Growing Up with John Wayne Gacy

After Gacy was released early for good behavior, Karen says she visited him regularly, and though she noticed a strange smell, she never suspected what was going on. "When [he and his second wife] moved in, there was always this kind of musty smell," she says. "In later years, he kept saying that there was water standing under the house and he was treating it with lime [and] that's what the mold smell was," she says.

Gacy and his second wife divorced about a year before he was arrested the second time. "Something in their marriage just started to break," Karen says. "He always had a way of pushing people away, and I think that that's what he did. Maybe it was a protection mode for her and the children."

Karen says she was in shock when she got the phone call telling her that her brother had been arrested again. "I just sat there and didn't know what to do. I had to talk to my mother," she says. "We cried and we hugged, and neither of us could believe it because it wasn't the person we knew. He was always good and kind and always taking care of us."