John Wayne Gacy very gradually ensnared his victims. He plied them with marijuana and alcohol and began by showing them heterosexual porn movies. He then shifted to gay porn. If the guest did not object, Gacy then did his “hand-cuff trick.” Once he had his victims imprisoned, he sodomised them. Gacy developed an elaborate ritual of torture in which he submerged his victims in a bathtub full of water with a plastic bag over their head and revived them before they died. Eventually they either died from the treatment or Gacy arranged them with his “rope trick.” He looped a cord around the victim’s throat, attached it to a stick, and slowly twisted the stick, tightening the noose. Gacy confessed that as he killed his victims, he recited aloud the Twenty-Third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd… Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil….”
