John Wayne Gacy on Dec. 21, 1978, at the Des Plaines Police Department.
Des Plaines Police Department/TNS
What is it about the Midwest that breeds so many serial killers?
What is in the soil that grows the sort of grisly murderers who launch a million headlines? Adam Rapp has wondered for a long time. He was born in Chicago and raised in Joliet in the 1970s, when Joliet was not the best place to grow up. Gangs proliferated. There were rumors of white vans whose drivers offered neighborhood boys a peek at a Playboy. You couldn’t escape to Chicago — killer clown John Wayne Gacy and nurse killer Richard Speck came out of there. Rapp’s father lived in Wilmette, but then John Carpenter’s “Halloween” came out when he was 10 and was based in Haddonfield, a fictional Illinois town “that looked like Wilmette, oak trees, porch swings. And that drove home the immediacy of my worries — I mean, how was I going to use my keys to get into my house and escape from a killer if my hands were shaking that bad?”
Rapp was closer to his fears than he knew.
When he was 5, his family was leaving the Kankakee area when “a driver pulled up next to us on I-57 brandishing a rifle, traveling in the oncoming lane.” Rapp was asleep beside his sister, who locked eyes with the gunman. Their mother, sitting in the passenger’s seat, looked over and clutched their baby brother (Anthony Rapp, who later became an acclaimed theater actor).
The gunman drove on.
That night, the mystery driver, a Chicagoan named Henry Brisbon, later dubbed the “I-57 killer,” killed three people. He was sent to Stateville Correctional, where Rapp’s mother worked as a nurse. (She would also serve as a material witness in Brisbon’s trial.) Stateville, a stone’s throw from their apartment, was home to Speck; Rapp’s mother was friends with the nurses that Speck killed. Stateville also briefly housed Gacy, and near the end of her career, Rapp’s mother attended to Gacy on the day of his execution.
Adam Rapp went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright and author whose themes tend to spring out of legacies of stray violence and social alienation. His new adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” — arguably the greatest young adult novel to address those topics — recently opened in previews on Broadway. But also nested in that career has been a question that Rapp hasn’t been able to shake since he was a child:
Why do so many famous murderers come out of the Midwest?
This story offers no answers. How could it? Murder is not a Midwest invention. But why then does the Midwest — and the Chicago area, in particular — appear to nurture such a grim, sensational history of unimaginable killings? Rapp can’t say. But lots of writers have tried. This spring alone, a pair of new novels chew over the question: There’s Rapp’s family epic, “Wolf at the Table,” and Cynthia Pelayo’s “Forgotten Sisters,” which tackles the persistent real-life rumor that a serial killer is targeting young men and dumping their bodies in the Chicago River. Spoiler: As compelling as both of these books read, neither get any closer to an understanding. Next month is the 100th anniversary of the killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by two University of Chicago students named Leopold and Loeb. At least morally, we are no closer to understanding that, either. Statistically, historically, New York and California generate more killers than the Midwest, but neither of those places wear them quite like the wheat fields and anonymous apartment complexes of the Midwest.
