A Question of Doubt: The John Wayne Gacy Story

by John Wayne Gacy

Signed first edition. #11 of 500! 100% authentic.

Genres: True Crime

225 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1995

Reviews

[Mariah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gacy spun a tale that not only showed his disregard to other human beings, but lied to the reader through omission. So many of the points he made in the book were laughably bad. Somehow, despite being the property owner, hiring his own employees to do work on his house, he had no idea how 20+ bodies ended up under his house? The main theme in the book is that everything that happened to him was never his fault. It wasn't his fault those bodies ended up under his house! It wasn't his fault that the house smelled like decay! The dog pooped on the floor! Please. Oh, please. It was so horrible how Gacy implied that all of deceased were just criminals, hustlers, gay, druggies, or overall throwaways, essentially saying that there was no point in even caring about their deaths. Even if all of that were true (despite the fact that the majority of the deceased were minors or barely legal), does a junkie deserve to be murdered and shoved under someone's house? It was even worse reading the final chapter, where it turned out that someone of those buried in the crawlspace were not actually dead, but unconscious when buried...they died underneath the house from suffocation. Gacy was a horrible person, and got what he deserved in the end, though his execution did not come soon enough. He really thought that he was slick in admitting to small things throughout the book, like as if no-one would notice. He really had the audacity to say that he was the "34th victim", because of the way he was prosecuted. Legal justice was no where near the nightmare that he put all of those innocent people, and their families through. The book is a novelty, I'm glad that I read it just to say that I did so, but I wouldn't do it again. An anti-social sociopath that never viewed humans as anything more than objects to him.

The final (or presumed final) chapter being over 100 pages long is absurd. What was the point of posting the court transcripts? Was it not possible to condense this information into the narrative format that the book had before? In chapter 13, the book starts becoming hard to digest, especially when the previous chapters were so short in comparison. There seemed to be more grammatical errors in the last chapter, and in various parts of the book, there were grammatical errors also. A common trend in books created by the convicted, they're so quick to release it, they never stop to proof read it.