When True Crime Gets It Right: Patrick McManus & Michael Chernus On Telling The Gacy Story-WEEK IN REVIEW
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Chernus opens up about the weight of portraying Gacy—not the tabloid version, but the eerily “normal” man who blended into his suburban community while carrying out unimaginable crimes. He listened to Gacy’s real voice on tapes passed down from attorney Bob Motta Sr., relayed through Bob Motta Jr., our guest and legal expert on the case.
We talk about the toll this kind of character work takes, how the series avoids gratuitous violence, and why refusing to show murder on screen actually makes the series more disturbing—and more respectful.
If you think you’ve seen every Gacy documentary, think again. This is the one that focuses not on the myth, but on the victims, the failures, and the masks we all miss.
#MichaelChernus #JohnWayneGacy #GacyTapes #DevilInDisguise #PeacockSeries #DefenseDiaries #TrueCrimeActing #PortrayingEvil #VictimFocusedTrueCrime #HiddenKillersPodcast
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers Week in review. |
| 0:02.4 | I look back at the most prolific stories of the week. |
| 0:05.3 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brewski. |
| 0:08.4 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:11.4 | The horror of him, I would say he has a foxy appeal to him. |
| 0:17.2 | And I think it may hit people different depending on where you are in the country or |
| 0:22.5 | where you grew up in the country. Bob grew up, you know, there in that area. I grew up in that |
| 0:27.6 | general area too. People did kind of talk like that. I feel like I feel like I knew many of people |
| 0:32.9 | that on the surface, you know, were kind of gasey-like. |
| 0:38.7 | A lot of use car dealers. |
| 0:43.4 | But, but, you know, there was that level of, you know, |
| 0:47.1 | you didn't quite know what was going on with some people behind the curtain. And, you know, gasey, obviously, it was far more extreme than anyone could have imagined. |
| 0:54.2 | I wonder, at the end of the day, and I'll ask you this, Michael, do you think John knew exactly who he was? |
| 1:01.1 | Or was he just such a chameleon? |
| 1:02.9 | He's always just changing skins because he was so uncomfortable in his own that he didn't know who he was. |
| 1:09.0 | We see it in the Michael, in the Brian Brian Coburger case where he seemed to be always |
| 1:13.8 | taking different snippets of different horrible characters from the past, I mean, including |
| 1:19.9 | even fictional ones like Norman Bates and, uh, the American psycho character, um, to, to make up who he is when we look at, at who, who he |
| 1:31.1 | became with the horrible Idaho murders. There are seemingly remnants of that here with, |
| 1:37.4 | with Gacy of, of the constant chameleon, constantly, I'm going to play the room to whoever the |
| 1:43.7 | crowd is, the best I can for whatever my |
| 1:46.5 | narcissistic needs are. Again, long question, but do you think John knew who he was? |
... |
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