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Stemming from his first marriage. john wayne gacy had a fairly extensive record -- minor types of things, basically -- you know, battery, disorderly conduct. but one conviction was for sodomy, and it was learned that it was performed against a young boy. cahill: on the day he was convicted, his wife filed for divorce, left him, took his two kids. he never saw any of them again. that ended his wonderful life he was having in waterloo, iowa, because he wound up in a penitentiary. jackson: after serving more than a year in prison, john wayne gacy moves to chicago to start an entirely new life, an...

In chicago, thousands upon thousands of young men and women go missing. woman: james byron haakenson disappeared shortly after moving to chicago. man: john butkovich, an 18-year-old north side youth, who disappeared on july 31st, 1975. [ telephone rings ] missing persons. polito. can i help you? sullivan: the police departments were understaffed when it came to the juvenile divisions. and it was very difficult to try to track runaways. sneed: typical in this case, and in many cases, families go to the police department, or they call and they say, "my son's missing," and they say, "well, wait 1...

Cahill: he became the director of the polish day parade. that, in chicago, is a big deal. on one of them, he met rosalynn carter, the wife of the president of the united states. so it's really no wonder with a reputation like that, that after this guy jeff rignall went to the police, that even though they did charge gacy, the charge went nowhere. hachmeister: jeff rignall reported this to the chicago police department, and jeff really didn't have that much information. so they couldn't do too much with it. he turned out to be an individual that the police didn't believe. duke: but what no one ...

Wilkinson: people knew in chicago that boys were disappearing. but of course, if you have one boy disappear and a week goes by and another disappears, it takes a long time before a pattern emerges. but nobody in chicago knows that the explanation for the disappearance of all these boys is that a serial killer is operating in these haunts. ♪ ♪ sneed: this guy -- his name was jeff rignall. walking outside a bar one night... ...when a guy in a black oldsmobile picked him up, asked if he wanted to share a joint. he was a clean-cut-looking man. and i got in the car with him. and shortly after i...

Quite naturally, some of the first paths that we took were to try to interview some of the people that worked for gacy. and one of the key things that they found out was that he had instructed these employees to go into his crawl space and dig trenches. and he claimed it was because they had a sewage issue and that he was trying to resolve that problem. and occasionally, the smell would come back up, so he'd instruct them to go in there with lime and spread lime down there, which would cover up that smell for a while. sullivan: they certainly were helpful in telling us that we really probably ...