Ours is a golden age of serial-killer entertainment. Anyone with a healthy victim list has books, docuseries, T-shirts, video games, and untold tchotchkes produced to burnish their legend. Stuck at home, we gorge ourselves on fact-based horror. Now the Peacock Network has brought back the granddaddy of self-aggrandizing murderers, the pride of Chicagoland, John Wayne Gacy, for Devil in Disguise, a six-part series that promises new revelations but mostly reinforces what has long been known.
All along there is a promise of new developments and revelations, but very little is established beyond doubt. The last two episodes spend a lot of time speculating on the burial of additional victims, but due to law enforcement hesitance (or cover-up, depending on which interviewee one believes), none have been found. Six of the 33 victims remain unidentified, while one of the 27 named is believed by his family and others to have been misidentified. It’s not quite Geraldo opening Capone’s vault, but there’s little here in terms of hard facts that wasn’t previously reported elsewhere.
