Destination Gacy: A Cross-Country Journey to Shake the Devil's Hand

By Nancy Rommelman

In 1994, journalist Nancy Rommelmann accompanied Rick Gaez, a 26-year-old pen pal of John Wayne Gacy, on a road trip from Los Angeles to Illinois, to visit the serial killer before his execution. Along the way, she took the moral temperature of people on college campuses, in bars, in churches, asking how they felt about Gacy and his being sentenced to death, for the torture and murder of 33 young men and teenage boys. Shackled in a tiny visiting room on death row, Gacy nevertheless turned on the charm. Chatty, slick, acting the father figure, albeit one who wants to know a little too much about your sex life, Gacy offered his hand and said, “Ask anything you want—I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve ever done.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Release date: May 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940838380

Nancy Rommelman

Nancy Rommelmann is an author and journalist whose work appears in the Wall Street Journal, the LA Weekly, and the New York Times, among other publications. Her book To the Bridge, a True Story of Motherhood and Murder, the story of Amanda Stott-Smith, who in 2009 dropped her two young children from a bridge in Portland, Oregon, will be published in July 2018. She is the author previously of the novel The Bad Mother (2011). The Queens of Montague Street (2012), a digital memoir of growing up in Brooklyn Heights in the 1970s, was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. The story collection Transportation was released in 2013. Destination Gacy, an e-book about Rommelmann's visit and interview with serial killer John Wayne Gacy, published in 2014. More at nancyromm.com

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