Death Date Lifts Serial Killer Out of Obscurity : John Wayne Gacy’s new team of lawyers leaps into action. A publicity blitz is planned, supporters rally. Efforts are seen as in vain.

John Wayne Gacy’s days repeat themselves, one after another, in the sort of well-ordered, stress-free routine that a maximum security prison can provide: Three square meals. Free time to correspond with pen pals. A regular pinochle game with fellow prisoners. And, when the spirit moves him, long hours devoted to painting.

It is an existence Gacy has grown accustomed to after 14 years spent on Death Row at Menard Correctional Institute in southern Illinois. He has lived there--in a 6-by-9-foot cell festooned with paintings of clown characters and a Chicago Cubs banner--since his March, 1980, conviction for the murders of 33 boys and young men in his suburban Chicago house, the worst recorded case of serial killings in the United States this century.

Now, after more than a decade of filing tortuous legal appeals to stave off a death sentence, Gacy’s routine faces the ultimate interruption. Last October, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Gacy’s appeal of his death sentence, and the Illinois Supreme Court quickly responded in December by ordering his death by lethal injection on May 10.

In the months since the court’s order, Gacy has become a high-profile inmate after years of reclusion. A new team of lawyers is filing last-ditch motions to overturn his conviction. He is sifting through interview offers from tabloid news shows, planning a publicity blitz to insist he killed no one. The Illinois attorney general is suing Gacy to recover profits from the sale of his artwork. And partisans even have set up a taped toll telephone number--advertised as “John Wayne Gacy Speaks”--to give voice to his protestations of innocence.

A new motion has been filed claiming that Gacy was “incompetent” to stand trial and, as a result, cannot be put to death because Illinois law prohibits the execution of incompetents. And after poring over old business records that Gacy kept in his work as a contractor, Gregory Adamski, one of his attorneys, now plans to submit proof alleging he was out of town--in Little Rock, Ark., Kansas City and Upstate New York--when several of the killings took place.

“If we can show that he did not kill even one of these boys, that throws doubt on the state’s case,” Adamski said.

Gacy was arrested in December, 1978, in suburban Norwood Park in connection with the disappearance of a 15-year-old boy who sought a part-time laborer’s job with Gacy’s building repair firm. Over the following weeks, police and medical examiners removed the skeletons of 29 youths from the crawl space under Gacy’s home. Pleading insanity, Gacy admitted the killings but was convicted and sentenced to death for 12 murders and given life sentences for the other 21 slayings.

Renee Goldfarb, a criminal appeals lawyer in Cook County, said she expected state appellate judges to make short work of Gacy’s final appeals. The incompetence claim has failed in the past, she said. And the tack of using business records to exonerate Gacy is so flimsy, Goldfarb said, that “his own (previous) lawyers repeatedly told him it was a waste of time.”

Meanwhile, state lawyers are seeking a court order to seize Gacy’s prison bank account under a little-used law allowing officials to recover the cost of his incarceration. As of December, the state had paid $141,074 to house Gacy at Menard.

Adamski has said that Gacy has made more than $30,000 on the sale of his artwork--oil paintings of pastoral scenes, skulls and grinning clowns. Before his arrest, Gacy, calling himself “Pogo,” appeared as a clown at children’s parties and charity events.

His paintings rarely sell for more than a “few hundred dollars,” Adamski said. Collectors are most often Gacy’s correspondents--he receives more than 100 letters a week, the lawyer said--or those fascinated with serial killers.

Gacy had spent up to six hours a day painting--a routine he recently suspended, Adamski said, because of the state’s attempt to seize his profits.

In a recent press conference detailing the effort against Gacy, Illinois Atty. Gen. Roland Burris said that the inmate “is still manipulating the system.” Fears that Gacy has been transferring his art profits to other accounts to frustrate the state’s legal bid has led one legislator to sponsor a state bill to freeze an inmate’s assets when a suit is filed.

As his death date approaches, Gacy likely will grant a paid interview to a tabloid news show, Adamski said--money that will be used to defray his legal costs. “Whoever will pay us the most,” Adamski said.

Meanwhile, Gacy sticks to his time-honored schedule, Adamski said, rising at 10 a.m., talking strategy with his lawyers, keeping up his contacts with his small tribe of friends on the outside. There are so many letters, Adamski said, that Gacy has collected his favorites in a slim volume of correspondence.

He calls it “Letters to Mr. Gacy.”