(For more on that case, watch the upcoming special, Rifkin on Rifkin: Private Confessions of a Serial Killer, Saturday, April 10 at 7/6c on Oxygen.) In the 1980s and '90s, Joel Rifkin killed 17 women in New York, many of them sex workers operating on the fringes of society whose disappearances were hardly noticed. The case serves as yet another reminder about the dangers of writing off vulnerable groups, but it's hardly the only one. Ultimately the search to find Piest, whose body had been dumped in the Des Plaines River because there was apparently no more room under Gacy's home, led to the discovery of his many victims, including the ones who had been previously dismissed as runaways. It was at that point they realized that Gacy was actually out on parole for sexually abusing a teen boy in Iowa a decade earlier. Investigators learned Piest disappeared soon after talking to Gacy about a potential job, which sparked a more thorough investigation of the killer, despite his insistence he knew nothing about the teen's whereabouts. “Often the ones who come to attention, they are attractive, they are upper middle class, they have other things that signal to people that we should worry about this one.” "We do have these caricatures of what deserving victims look like,” Hamby told. When Robert Piest, 15, vanished in December 1978, the public concern was high and police were positive he was no runaway. It took a missing beloved honors student to really break this investigation open. “I think blaming victims or ignoring victims helps us pretend that we are safe,” she said. Police or the public sometimes assume there was something wrong with the missing young person when in reality there was either some abuse going on at home or they didn’t run away at all, she said.
She said that killers like Gacy have learned how to identify people that will likely be ignored more than other potential victims.įurthermore, she noted that people who are deemed runaways, particularly during the era when Gacy was actively killing, are often blamed for their own circumstances. “Predators like Gacy are well familiar with this,” Hamby, who also runs ResilienceCon, an annual convention that focuses on preventing and responding to violence, told. These are people who often come from broken homes and live “on the fringe.” She said they often fall through the cracks and are often not properly investigated if they go off the radar. Sherry Hamby, a research p rofessor of psychology at the University of the South, told that some people, even as mere children, are deemed “throwaways” by society. He was chloroformed, violently raped and beaten by Gacy, but survived the encounter. After being freed by the killer following the harrowing ordeal, Rignall went to the police, but despite his apparent physical wounds and chloroform burns on his face, authorities didn’t take his account of the attack too seriously, chalking it up to the perils of the gay sex scene, as the docuseries notes.ĭr. James Byron Haakenson, 16, ran away from his home in Minnesota in 1976 after feeling like he was unwelcome because of his sexuality, the Huffington Post reported in 2017.Īnd then there was Jeffrey Rignall, a 26-year-old gay man whom Gacy invited into his car in March 1978, ostensibly to smoke marijuana. Gacy also targeted actual runaways, sometimes people who were shunned by their own family because they were gay. There was also John Mowery, a 19-year-old Marine whose sister was murdered six years earlier. Then there was Timothy O’Rourke, 20, who vanished in June of 1978, and was known for frequenting gay bars. The list goes on: Robert Winch, 18, had moved to Chicago from Michigan after getting in trouble after he ran away from a foster home. Investigators even relied on Gacy, who was considered a respectable member of society due to his business and political connections, as well as his charitable work, as a witness the serial killer told them that Szyc sold him his car to get enough money to leave town. In the docuseries, relatives express their frustration about how he was dismissed as a runaway by police. John Szyc, 1 9, vanished in January of 1977 and his family reported him missing.
John Wayne Gacy Left A Telltale Mark On His Victims