If you only watch one true crime series this year, make it this one.
Published on TVFanatic.com
Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy Is True Crime Done Right.
I haven’t felt this strongly about a true crime series in years.
Maybe it’s because I’ve grown tired of killers turned into pop culture trophies, or maybe it’s because Peacock’s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy finally gets it right.
Either way, it struck a nerve in me that I haven’t been able to shake. It didn’t do it with shock value; it did it with humanity.
We’ve been conditioned to consume murder as entertainment. Ryan Murphy built an empire on that with his glossy, gory, and hollow Monster series.
Devil in Disguise is the antidote. It doesn’t feed off horror but mourns it. It reminds us that evil doesn’t deserve fascination. People do.
This series never asks why Gacy did what he did, because there’s no why that matters. What matters are the kids who took him at his word — who thought they were getting a decent job for five dollars an hour when minimum wage was half that.
Some were hired to dig under his house, not knowing they were digging their own graves or those of friends they’d never see again.
They weren’t turning to crime or trying to pull a fast one. They were trying to live better, and creator Patrick Macmanus ensures that this prevailing thought is always front and center on Devil in Disguise.
And when the press labeled them as “homosexuals looking for a good time who got more than they bargained for,” the cruelty doubled.
They weren’t out prowling the streets — they were trusting a man who smiled like a neighbor and called himself a mentor. That’s what makes it unbearable.
The story of Samuel Stapleton haunts me most, although I’m sure every story, if they’d had time to tell every story of every one of the 33 boys and men Gacy murdered, would affect me similarly.
Samuel was just fourteen years old when he was murdered. He had convictions and a family who loved him. He was a boy, just a boy, when he welded a bracelet to his wrist because he loved it, and his family teased him about it. He was just a boy.
That bracelet, which proudly symbolized his burgeoning manhood, became his identification when his bones were found in the crawl space. He babysat his niece. He had a good mom. He just wanted to make a few dollars. And he wound up a victim instead.
Those dig scenes — the endless shoveling, the discovery of bones beneath a house that looked like every house on the block — are the most terrifying moments I’ve seen on television.
They’re not terrifying because of gore, but because they’re humbling. They show the cost of indifference, the nightmare in part caused by a system that looked away.