How does a man shake the hand of the First Lady of the United States in May, then drive home and bury a teenage boy under his linen cupboard before midnight?

How does a Polish picnic organiser, a precinct captain, a children's hospital clown, run twenty seven young men into the dirt beneath his own kitchen floor across six straight years on a quiet suburban street, while his neighbours bring round Christmas hampers and the postman calls him by his first name?

The headlines about John Wayne Gacy will give you the body count. They will not give you the why.

This audiobook takes you all the way back. Into the cold basement of his alcoholic father's house. Into the small hollow space where the wiring for empathy was meant to grow and never did. Into the long careful stack of social levers he learned to pull on every lad who walked through his front door. Into the back bedroom with the mattress on the floor and the rope trick leaning against the chair. Into the small cell at Menard, the long winter on death row, and the brain on a high shelf in formalin between two unrelated specimens.

You will discover why his brain looked anatomically normal. Why his mother chose not to know. Why one Polish American lieutenant read the truth in forty unhurried minutes when nobody else had read it in six years. Why the families burned his clown paintings in a steel drum at the back of a community centre.

You will leave the final tick able to spot the pattern.

Most of you, by then, will already have spotted someone in your own life inside it.

CraigBeck.com