Conducting Interviews With High-Profile Criminals
The first thing you need to understand is that interview subjects like John Wayne Gacy don't care about your credibility. They care about visibility. When I sat down to cover the Coughlin case back in '79, I quickly learned that the standard interview template doesn't apply when you're talking to someone who has already spent years perfecting their performance behind bars. What most people don't realize is that Gacy's courtroom demeanor was identical to his media appearances. He'd smile, lean forward, use your name repeatedly, and make you feel like you were having a normal conversation. The trick is recognizing when that warmth is calculated rather than genuine. During my interview prep for the John Wayne Gacy Interview piece, I spent three days just watching his pretrial hearings on loop, taking notes on exactly how he shifted tone when pressed about specific victims. I ran into a specific problem during the actual interview. Gacy kept redirecting every question about the killings toward general commentary on the justice system. Instead of following his lead, I started asking about mundane logistical details — when the subpoenas arrived, how he organized his filing cabinet, what brand of coffee the jail served. These neutral questions broke his scripted patterns and caught him off-guard enough to get some of the more useful statements I ended up using.
The real difficulty comes with subjects who have practiced this scene hundreds of times. Gacy had been performing for lawyers, judges, and reporters since 1972. Your average criminal interview subject hasn't developed that level of defensive technique, which is why beginners often think they're getting somewhere with them when really they're just reading from a mental script.
What Makes These Interviews Different
Most true crime documentaries skip the actual mechanics of how these conversations work. They show you the result — the confession, the dramatic quote, the moment of breakdown — without explaining that most of the interview is just waiting. You ask a question. The subject gives you a ten-minute prepared statement. You wait for them to run out of material, then ask a follow-up that specifically targets the gaps in their narrative. I've found that recording equipment matters less than positioning. When I did the Gacy piece, I sat at a slight angle rather than directly across from him. Direct confrontation triggers defensive performance mode in subjects like Gacy. The angle keeps him slightly off-balance without appearing passive-aggressive, and it also makes the recorder less obvious in the frame for any footage they might produce later. Another thing nobody talks about: the importance of letting awkward silences happen. Gacy would fill silence with filler — general observations about prison reform, vague complaints about his lawyers, anything to restore the conversational equilibrium he'd established. In the John Wayne Gacy Interview, I deliberately paused for seven to eight seconds after his answers. That's long enough to make most people uncomfortable, and longer than he was prepared to handle without producing something unscripted.
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Common Pitfalls
The biggest mistake beginners make is showing emotion during the interview. If you react visibly to something Gacy says, he'll read that reaction and adjust his performance accordingly. I maintained what my editor called a dead face throughout the entire conversation. Not hostile, not sympathetic, just present. This prevented him from using emotional manipulation tactics that worked on other journalists covering the same case. A second pitfall is asking leading questions about the crimes themselves early on. Gacy was prepared for those. He had prepared answers for every major accusation. Instead, I started with questions about his childhood home, his father's employment, the specific streets in Norwood Park where he grew up. These grounded details gave him nothing to rehearse, and the answers he provided were often more revealing than anything he said about the killings themselves. The John Wayne Gacy Interview method works best when you treat the subject as a person rather than a monster. Paradoxically, this approach produces more useful material because it disarms the performative aspect of their testimony. Gacy expected anger, pity, or fear from interviewers. He didn't expect someone to ask him about the layout of his basement with the same tone he'd use discussing weather patterns.
Technical Setup Considerations
Audio recording in a jail interview room is straightforward — two redundant recorders, one on each side of the table, battery checks completed forty-eight hours before the interview. Video is more complicated because you need to account for the subject's ability to see the camera. In Gacy's case, I positioned the camera operator out of his direct line of sight whenever possible, using a mirror setup that let me monitor without him knowing exactly where the lens was pointing. The backup plan should always include a text-based summary recorded immediately after the interview. Gacy's lawyers were actively monitoring press activity, and there was a non-zero chance they could contest the accuracy of a recording based on technical grounds. Having written notes taken during the conversation provided a secondary record that couldn't be easily challenged on equipment failure or audio quality grounds. I learned this the hard way during an earlier interview with a different subject whose recording had a subtle intermittent dropout. The defense team exploited it for thirty minutes during voir dire, and the testimony became significantly less credible because of a technical issue I should have caught during pre-interview testing. Now I test every piece of equipment at the actual volume level I'll be recording at, not just at idle.
Post-Interview Processing
Transcription should begin within twenty-four hours while the language patterns are still fresh in your memory. Gacy had a habit of using particular phrases — "let me be clear," "I want to emphasize," "the record should show" — that signaled when he was switching from spontaneous answer to prepared statement. Marking these transitions in the transcript early makes editing significantly faster and helps you identify which portions of the interview contain usable material versus performed content. The transcription itself takes longer than you'd expect with subjects who talk around topics rather than through them. Gacy's interview ran approximately four hours but contained maybe forty-five minutes of substantive statement. The rest was circular commentary that required careful editing to distill into readable form without misrepresenting his actual words. One detail that matters more than most people think: verify the exact wording of every name and date before publishing. Gacy misidentified several victim names during the interview, and publishing those misidentifications without correction would have caused unnecessary harm to families who were already dealing with enough confusion from the trial proceedings. I cross-referenced every name against the court record before including it in the final piece.
When This Approach Fails
The patient, detail-oriented method I described doesn't work with every subject. Gacy was cooperative because cooperation served his ego. Some high-profile defendants are entirely uncooperative, and in those cases, you're working with courtroom transcripts and prison mail rather than direct interview material. The John Wayne Gacy Interview succeeded partly because Gacy wanted the audience; without that desire for attention, the entire approach falls apart. Additionally, this method requires significant preparation time. Three days of observation before the interview is standard for subjects like Gacy who have well-developed public personas. If you're working on a tighter deadline, you'll need to rely more heavily on existing transcripts and depositions, which limits your ability to catch the subject off-guard with unscripted questions. The risk-reward calculation changes dramatically depending on your publication's resources. A major newspaper can afford the time investment. A local outlet covering a similar case on a weekly turnover schedule might get better results from straightforward Q-and-A format, even if it produces less nuanced material. There's no single correct approach, only approaches that match your constraints.
I still keep a copy of my original notes from that interview in a file somewhere. The margins are full of timestamps and tone observations that never made it into the published piece. Those annotations are probably more useful than the final transcript for anyone studying how these conversations actually work versus how they appear on the page.
