John Wayne Gacy: no tears for the Killer Klown

Biography

John Wayne Gacy (aka “The Killer Klown”) was a Chicago-area serial killer who sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men during the 1970s. Most ended up buried under the crawl space beneath his suburban home.

Brutalized by his father throughout his youth, and sexually molested as a child by a family acquaintance, Gacy subsequently initiated homosexual contacts with several of his employees. He worked in a mortuary for a short period and at one time climbed naked into a coffin with a deceased young man.

While briefly serving time for sodomy, he was a model prisoner, and initiated a number of improvements in prison conditions. He was for a time the manager of three KFC stores and later a successful building contractor. A zealous social networker, he was an ardent Democrat and a president of the local Jaycees, whose dubious social activities at the time included prostitution and wife-swapping.

He was married twice, although his second wife divorced him for sexual impotency. He liked to entertain at children’s parties wearing a signature clown costume, for which reason he was later dubbed “The Killer Klown.” After being incarcerated, he began to paint, often featuring himself in costume. Some of his paintings sold for as much as $20,000, although many were later bought by victims’ families in order to be burned.

Chart analysis

John Wayne Gacy was born 17 March 1942, at 00h29 in Chicago, IL. His chart has Scorpio rising, with ascendant lord Mars in the 7th house conjoined prime malefic Saturn, a placement that indicates the strong potential for violence, since both aspect the ascendant. The nodes in the angles, aside from being themselves malefic, also take on the role of malefic proxies, since Rahu receives the special aspect of Mars, and Ketu that of Saturn.

NB: The charts below show the ascendant and all planets in the sidereal zodiac.

The angles are occupied by two negative house lords – 6th lord Mars and 8th lord Mercury. And since 12th lord Venus is in mutual reception with Saturn, post-exchange, it (virtually) transfers from 3rd house to 7th, thus putting all three trikasthana (houses 6-8-12) lords in the angles.

Other aspects of this mutual reception are noteworthy. Venus and Saturn exchange via kama (desire) houses. But a post-exchange Venus in the 7th creates a condition called karako bhavo nashto, which spoils relationships. And if Venus takes its own degree into the 7th, it joins planetary war with Jupiter, a struggle that afflicts both the object of affection (5th lord Jupiter) and the partner (7th lord Venus). While Venus is ordinary, Saturn has directional strength in the 7th house, giving it the power to function as control planet in this mutual reception. Its position in the 7th reflects the homicidal nature of his sexual obsessions.

The murders

After years of engaging in forced homosexual rape, for which he served 18 months in prison, Gacy returned to “normal” life. He got married again, bought a house and started a home renovation and contracting business, in which he employed several young men. Several of these he invited home and “entertained” in his garage, plying them with liquor and playing games with handcuffs, which often left his victims helpless in the face of his homosexual advances.

Although married for a portion of this time, he also liked to pick up teenage boys and young men at bus terminals. Sometimes he would flash a gun and a fake sheriff’s badge to force them into his car. More typically, he would offer them marijuana to lure them to his house, where he overpowered them, held them captive to sexually abuse, then murdered and buried them.

Gacy’s crime chronology, from January 1972 to December 1978, spanned seven full years. The first two murders occurred during Mercury dasha (major planetary period), within the Jupiter and Saturn bhuktis (minor planetary periods). In hindsight, these may have been unplanned murders. But in his Ketu dasha, Gacy clearly embarked on a spree, sometimes killing two victims in the same week, and burying them in carefully-mapped trenches beneath the crawl space of his house.

KP activation via dasha and bhukti

Krishnamurti Paddhati (KP) is one of Vedic astrology’s famous predictive systems. One of its general rules is that dasha and bhukti periods will give results for their star lords (nakshatra dispositors) more readily than they will for themselves. [The zodiac comprises 27 nakshatras of 13deg20 span, three of each ruled by one of the visible planets and nodes.] And for the act of murder, we expect the trikasthanas – the 6th, 8th and 12th houses – to be involved, because they represent wrong actions.

• The 7th represents others. Therefore the 6th involves harm, injury or death to another, since it is 12th (loss) from the 7th.
• Since the 9th is the classic dharma house, the 8th is the classic anti-dharma house, being the violation of all that is good and proper. The 8th also reflects trauma, violence and death.
• By a similar logic, the 12th represents the undoing of the Self, the end of things, the loss of the soul, whose integrity is irrevocably destroyed by such a heinous act as rape or murder.

Aside from invoking the 8th house which it owns, Mercury dasha worked first for its star lord Rahu, whose effects are described below. (The nodes act like proxies, on behalf of planets with which they are associated and aspected, as well as their sign and nakshatra dispositors.) In this chart, Rahu facilitates murder.

After Mercury, Ketu dasha was even more powerful to wreak violence. Ketu is associated with Mercury, the 8th lord as noted, but it is also aspected and disposited by Saturn. Although Saturn has no connection with either the 8th or 12th house, it is a maraka (death-enabling) planet, as well as the karaka (generic significator) for death. In Ketu dasha, Gacy committed 31 of his 33 murders.

As can be seen by the graph here, Gacy committed most of his murders in the bhuktis of the Sun, Moon and Rahu.

• The Sun invokes its nakshatra lord Jupiter, a double maraka associated with Mars and Saturn in the 7th. The Sun, considered a cruel planet, rules the 10th of karma, the acts for which one becomes known.
• The Moon serves its star lord Saturn, which has directional strength in the 7th. The Moon itself is very dark, thus one of the signatures for a disturbed mind. As 9th lord of dharma, it implies great moral weakness.
• Rahu acts on behalf of 8th lord Mercury and 6th lord Mars, both of which aspect it. It also serves its sign dispositor, the cruel Sun, and its nakshatra dispositor, 12th lord Venus. Thus all three trikasthanas (6-8-12) are activated under Rahu’s period.

Transits leave a signature of the perpetrator

The Wikipedia entry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy] on John Wayne Gacy provides the dates of the disappearances of 26 of Gacy’s victims, all of whom ended up dead and buried beneath his suburban house. During Gacy’s confession, he said that almost two dozen of his victims had died between 3:00 and 6:00 AM.

Rather than speculate about where within that range of three hours the murders might have occurred, I chose to calculate the victim/event charts for midnight of the day the victims disappeared. We can assume that Gacy was out and about, or already had a victim in his car, by this time of night. His intention was formed. The fact that it is midnight – the hour of witches and demons – gives it a symbolic argument as well.

Gacy had something of a perpetrator’s profile, with the four most powerful malefics in the angles: Saturn, Mars and the nodes. On seeing this, I wondered whether the event charts might also correspond in some way with his chart.

First note that any given planet has four chances in 12 to be angular. So in 26 events, a given planet should be angular about 8.7 times. But in the case of the Gacy murders, the malefics were far more evident than expected:

• Saturn was angular 16 times
• Mars was angular 15 times
• Rahu and Ketu were angular 13 times

It was as if Gacy had left his “astrological” fingerprints on most of the victims’ disappearances.

Although that notion wouldn’t sound far-fetched to any astrologer, even some open-minded criminologists might entertain the idea. Indeed, within the field of forensic science, Locard’s exchange principle holds that the perpetrator of a crime will inevitably bring something into the crime scene and probably leave with something from it, and that both can be used as forensic evidence.

Conclusion

As per KP analysis, we saw that the bulk of Gacy’s 33 murders occurred during the conjoined periods of a dasha and a few bhuktis that most effectively activated his trikasthanas (houses 6-8-12) wherein evil work is done.

Furthermore, we also saw that the victim/event charts themselves mirrored the birth chart of the perpetrator, leaving his astrological fingerprints at the time of the crime.

Although it would be impossible to search the general public, this method might well be used to review a list of suspects, eliminating some while targeting others as per the “fit” of their birth charts to the crime. In other words, one could use astrology to determine whether a crime scene profile fits the suspect.

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Alan Annand is a graduate of the American College of Vedic Astrology and a former tutor for the British Faculty of Astrological Studies. His New Age Noir crime novels (Scorpio Rising, Felonious Monk, Soma County) feature astrologer and palmist Axel Crowe, whom one reviewer has dubbed “Sherlock Holmes with a horoscope.”

He’s also the author of several non-fiction books. Stellar Astrology, Volumes 1 & 2, offer a wealth of time-tested techniques in the form of biographical profiles, analyses of world events, and technical essays. Parivartana Yoga is a reference text for one of the most common yet powerful planetary combinations in jyotish. Mutual Reception is an expanded companion volume for western practitioners, covering the same subject of planetary exchange through the lens of traditional astrology.

Websites: www.navamsa.com, www.sextile.com

You can find his books on Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.