local Democratic party. As a Democratic precinct captain he once had his picture taken with First Lady Rosalyn Carter.

Gacys second wife divorced him in March of 1976. According to accounts in Harlan Mendenhalls book, Fall of the House of Gacy, Gacy's second wife felt she could no longer cope with the marriage due to her husband's unpredictable moods and bizarre obsession with homosexual magazines. The couple did not have children.

On Dec. 12, 1978, the police again focused their attention on John Wayne Gacy. Robert Piest, a teenage stock boy at a local Des Plaines pharmacy, had come up missing. Gacy was the last person seen with the boy prior to his disappearance. When investigators ran a background check on Gacy, they were surprised to discover that he hadpreviously served time for committing sodomy on a teenage boy. With this incriminating information, investigators were able to obtain a warrant to search Gacys house. During the execution of the warrant, investigators entered a crawl space located beneath the home. A rancid odor was quickly noticed. The smell was believed to be faulty sewage lines and was quickly dismissed. Without any noticeable incriminating evidence, investigators returned to headquarters to run tests on the evidence they seized.

During a review of the items confiscated from Gacys house, investigators soon realized that they had unknowingly seized a piece of critical evidence. One of the rings found at Gacys house belonged to another teenager who had disappeared a year earlier. With this new information, investigators began to realize the possible enormity of