What You Don’t Know


Travel Guide

Denver, Colorado

This is a story which could happen anywhere – a monster living in the middle of a normal city, a pillar of the community, a man who seemed to generally love children and who even dressed as a clown to entertain them.  A man who is jailed for killing many of the young people he befriended, and is jailed. However, the consequences of what he did has repercussions years later as the survivors fail to adapt, the families of those who lost their loved ones still obviously traumatised by what took place.

This is a shocking story which has actually shockingly happened. In 1970s Chicago a man named John Wayne Gacy was the pillar of his local community. He knew many police officers as friends, dressed as a clown and held children’s parties, owned his own construction business and hired many local young boys to work for him. Meanwhile, he was killing them, homeless men, runaways – anyone who he assumed would not be missed. He tortured and killed them and hid most of them in his basement in a normal, respectable looking home in the centre of Chicago. No one believed that Gacy was capable of such a thing – he was well respected, well liked…living in plain sight.

The fictional version:

What you don’t know

MOTHER OF SEEVER VICTIM SPEAKS

By Sammie Peterson

The mother of one of Jacky Seever’s youngest victims has broken her silence in a brief interview with the Post.

Kenny Fitz’s body was the seventh to be dug up when excavations of Seever’s property began at the end of December.

He was fifteen when police launched a search for him in 2004 but the case of his disappearance went unsolved when no body was found.

“He’d left the house in a rage because of some stupid argument we had. I can’t remember what it was about now,” Paula Fitz recalls. “He’d run off a million times before, so I didn’t think anything of it when he didn’t come back that night. He always stayed on a friend’s sofa.”

Discovered still wearing scraps of the punk-rock shirt he was wearing the day he went missing, Kenny was identified quickly by police.

“He was always playing his music; drove us all crazy. The only one that didn’t seem to mind was Buzz, Kenny’s dog. Buzz hasn’t been the same since [Seever] took Kenny.”

Seever’s arrest in December and the ensuing discovery of Kenny and other missing persons has offered some relief to Paula and other family members impacted by the businessman’s crimes. But Paula will continue to live with the horror of her son’s death.

“Nothing can make up for what he did to Kenny and all those other innocent people,” Paula says. “I can’t sleep thinking about what my son must have gone through. This whole city wants to see that monster dead.”

Paula has recently reached out to other relatives of Seever’s victims, in the hope that they can provide support to each other in these exceptional circumstances.

KENNY FITZ: Body discovered in December.