If you’re from Chicago, or have lived here for any significant length of time, the three-part Netflix documentary “Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes” is little more than a repackaging of the well-known, if disturbing, story of this serial killer. For anyone else — and especially perhaps for viewers born in the decades after he committed at least 33 murders of teenage boys and young men in his Norwood Park home throughout the 1970s — the horror show that was Gacy might be more obscure, and director Joe Berlinger’s series is as decent a retelling as any. There is no shortage of TV and film about Gacy. This is just one more.
The show relies on audiotapes of Gacy himself, culled from interviews with his defense team that took place between November 1979 and April 1980, while he was awaiting trial. The tapes are what’s new here, but they offer no revelations. Gacy is matter of fact, self-serving and frequently arrogant; he never contemplates the magnitude of what he’s done or why. It isn’t compelling. Nearly half a century later, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if friends and families of the victims are exhausted by the prospect of Gacy having his say once again, as he has so many times before.
There are present-day interviews throughout as well, and the stories of two men who managed to escape Gacy’s clutches are deeply moving and they go a long way toward humanizing the experiences of all the victims. “I could have been one of those skeletons they found,” one of them says. The darkness of Gacy’s facial expression haunts him to this day. Gacy’s crimes, which included rape and torture, are profoundly disturbing; the remains of 29 bodies were found buried in his basement, as well as in his garage, before he ran out of space. “For days and days, we kept digging them out,” says one of the police officers.
