On John Wayne Gacy, Actor Michael Chernus, and Why We Do the Work We Do

Several weeks after my first feature, “Going to Gacy: A Cross-Country Trip Shake the Devil’s Hand,” appeared on the cover of the LA Weekly, the paper printed a Letter to the Editor.

“If there was any justice in the world,” the letter read, “Nancy Rommelmann would be the next victim of the next John Wayne Gacy.”

Flash-forward thirty years, to lunch today with actor Michael Chernus, who’s been cast to play Gacy in an upcoming series on Peacock. Sitting outdoors at a pub along the water in Kingston, New York, we got formalities out of the way: How was Chernus feeling about playing a serial killer? How did his wife feel? What were his friends saying?

“They’re like, ‘We hope you have a good therapist,’” said the actor, who you might know from Orange Is the New Black and whom I’ve been a fan of since the fantastic and under-appreciated series Patriot.

It might be that being dually familiar with Gacy’s crimes in the 1970s - he killed at least 33 young men and boys and buried them under and around his home in a Chicago suburb - was something of an ultimate icebreaker; Michael and I were on the same wavelength immediately, about how sociopaths take great pleasure in deceiving others; how they often present themselves as gregarious and helpful, while waiting for their moment to see you suffer, emotionally, financially, physically. Gacy is of course an extreme example, but I am betting most readers here can point to someone in their personal or work lives who is a recidivistic user of others.

Michael and I discussed the voraciousness with which Gacy used people; how their attention, fear, awe, and horror were his very food. He commented that, by the time I met Gacy, in the last week of his life, he must have been desperate for a last hit.

Yes. As I ended my original piece:

“By the time I got to Gacy, he'd been converted to a caricature, a clown playing one last show for an audience crowing for the finale, and the next act. 

“Just tell us when to tune in. If we can name our enemy, we can hate him, and participate in his defeat. All we ask is a chance to stand near the pyre as the paper image we spend so much time creating explodes in a furious wall of flame.”

As we finished lunch, Michael and I did not wonder at the fact that Gacy killing in 1970s Illinois somehow threw us together in 2024 in upstate New York, and we did not wonder because we each told a story.

“I don’t want get all whoo-whoo,” Michael said, but that after accepting the Gacy role, he and his wife, during a trip to the midwest, had taken a detour so they could drive past Gacy’s home. It had been paved over, a new house built in its place, and yet Michael said his body registered… not fright so much as a longing, a reaching out; that there was a lot going on there still.

I am not whoo-whoo, either, but I can believe there is a lot going on their still; how can there not be? Also, that by agreeing to do the role, Michael will in a sense be telling the boys’ stories, too; that if production does its job with care, which it seems to want to do, he will be introducing us to them as they also lived.

I told him then of a dream I had as I was finishing up To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder. I was in a kindergarten room. At a table was Eldon, the murdered four-year-old I had been writing about. I sat on a little chair next to him and asked if he could write his name for me. He did, and handed me the paper, in a way I knew meant, “Remember me.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion famously said. Maybe my thinking Eldon charged me with telling his story, or that 33 dead boys now look to Michael Chernus to tell theirs, is a narrative conceit, the writer’s way of organizing the world. But I don’t see a better reason to do the work we do.