John Wayne Gacy was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured, and murdered at least 33 young men and boys. Gacy committed all of his murders inside his ranch house near Norridge, a village in Norwood Park Township, metropolitan Chicago, Illinois. He was convicted of sodomy of a teenage boy in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1968 and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, but served eighteen months. He murdered his first victim in 1972, had murdered twice more by the end of 1975. He became known as the Killer Clown due to his public services as a clown.