Watching Netflix's "Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes" – a follow-up to its Ted Bundy version – feels like watching a slow-moving train wreck. It unfurls gradually, in excruciating detail. In the series, Gacy offers his own accounting of himself as portions of 60 hours of unearthed audio from interviews with him are employed. However, such an unreliable narrator who is keen only to defend himself rarely gives an honest answer about the 33 murders he perpetrated during the 1970s shortly before his 1994 execution.
Across three episodes, director Joe Berlinger portrays a 1970s culture of sexual suppression and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. It was this environment that supposedly activated the psychotic tendencies of Gacy — a powerful Chicago political force and part-time clown who assaulted and murdered young men without remorse — and allowed him to get away with it.
