Murder of Timothy McCoy
Timothy Jack McCoy was an American teenager from Omaha, Nebraska. He is the first known victim of serial killer and sex offender John Wayne Gacy, who raped, tortured and murdered at least 33 young men and boys in Norwood Park Township, near Chicago, Illinois, between 1972 and 1978.
McCoy encountered Gacy at Chicago's Greyhound bus terminal in the early hours of January 3, 1972, while he waited for a connecting bus to his father's home in Nebraska due the following noon. He was lured to Gacy's home and subsequently stabbed to death. His body was later buried in the crawl space beneath the property, and was only recovered following Gacy's December 1978 arrest, although his body remained unidentified until May 1986.
Following his 1986 identification, McCoy's remains were returned to his family. His body was interred alongside his father at Westlawn-Hillcrest Funeral Home and Memorial Park in his home state of Nebraska.
Prior to his identification, McCoy was informally known as the Greyhound Bus Boy and officially as both Body 9 and Case #1279 Dec. 78. His informal moniker was a reference to the Chicago Greyhound bus terminal where he first encountered Gacy and how his murderer largely chose to refer to him; his formal monikers refer to his sequential recovery order from beneath Gacy's property and his assigned medical examiner reference number.
Early life
Timothy Jack McCoy was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 14, 1955, the third of four children born to Jack and Norma "Susie" McCoy. He had two older sisters, Cynthia and Linda, and a younger brother, Terry. His father was a laborer and country and western singer, whereas his mother was a homemaker.The McCoy family frequently relocated throughout America throughout Timothy's life, with the family variously living in Iowa, Nebraska and Florida in addition to frequently traveling across state lines to locations such as Missouri to visit relatives. On one occasion, Jack McCoy relocated his family to California in the hope of securing a record deal, although one of the McCoy daughters soon developed a severe respiratory disease, resulting in the family returning to Iowa. In the early 1970s, Jack and Norma—then residing in Florida—divorced, with Norma soon remarrying and gradually returning to Iowa. Both daughters had left the household by this stage; as such, only Timothy and Terry remained at home. Terry chose to live with his mother, whereas Timothy remained with his father following the divorce. Shortly thereafter, Jack McCoy and his older son returned to Nebraska. Months later, Timothy obtained a false ID and secured employment as a forklift operator in nearby Council Bluffs.
Timothy was a fan of rock music, with his favorite album being Cosmo's Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival, whom he is believed to have seen perform live at Woodstock in August 1969. One of his cousins, Jeffrey Billings, described Timothy as "one of them guys that, when you were around him, he was happy, he'd make you laugh", adding that "he always had something to say."
Christmas 1971
Shortly before Christmas 1971, Timothy visited his cousins in Lansing, Michigan; he spent the Christmas holidays and New Year's Day 1972 at this location, engaging in activities such as snowball fights, riding with relatives in the family's snowmobile and creating a homemade festive 8mm camera movie. On Christmas Day, Timothy received a new belt buckle engraved with the outline of a Ford Model A car as a gift from his cousins; he wore this buckle for the remainder of his visit.Timothy's teenage cousin, Beverly Billings, would later recollect that in the final days of 1971, several of her female friends expressed an interest in Timothy, causing him to joke he should perhaps relocate to Michigan.
The day after New Year's Day 1972, Timothy's cousins and their parents dropped him off at the Capital Area Multimodal Gateway in East Lansing, with view to his catching a Greyhound bus to Omaha via Chicago. Prior to boarding the bus, Timothy promised his relatives he would call them once he reached his aunt's house in Iowa. According to his relatives, they watched Timothy board the bus, then wave at them through the window as the vehicle began its interstate journey. They never saw or heard from him again.
Arrival in Chicago
Timothy arrived in Chicago sometime late in the evening of January 2. His connecting bus was not scheduled to depart until noon of the following day, which gave him some time to spend in Chicago. As he wandered within and around the station with little or nothing to occupy his time, he encountered an individual who pulled his car to the curb, then wound down the driver's-side window of his car and asked Timothy what he was doing. The driver was John Wayne Gacy.Encounter with Gacy
Gacy later recollected that after introducing himself to Timothy and asking his business, the teenager replied with a comment to the effect of: "I ain't doing nothing. I got twelve hours to kill." Gacy then offered the teenager an impromptu sightseeing tour of the city after learning Timothy was from out of state and that his bus was not due for several hours—an offer Timothy accepted.According to Gacy, after driving around the city and describing several local landmarks to Timothy, the teenager expressed that he was hungry and agreed to accompany him to his home in Norwood Park Township, with Gacy promising the teenager food and stating that as he currently had the house to himself, he could spend the night in the spare bedroom and be driven to the bus station in the morning in time to catch his connecting bus.
Gacy prepared a lunch meat sandwich for Timothy, which the teenager ate in the living room before accepting "a couple of" shots of neat clear grain alcohol as Gacy drank a beer. The conversation between the two then turned to sex. Despite the fact that Timothy is known to have been heterosexual, Gacy claimed the two then "got into oral sex, both ways." If Gacy's accounts of a sexual encounter between the two are true, it remains unknown whether these were consensual acts.
Shortly thereafter, Gacy told the teenager he " tired"; he told Timothy he could sleep in the spare bedroom and that he would drive him to the bus station in time to catch his connecting bus. The two then went to sleep in separate bedrooms of the property.
Murder
Although Gacy's accounts regarding his encounter with Timothy and the events to occur at his home prior to falling asleep were largely consistent, his accounts of the events following his awaking on the morning of January 3 varied. Initially, he claimed that "around four in the morning" he awoke to observe the silhouetted teenager standing in the doorway to his bedroom, backlit from the light in a room across the hallway, holding the same knife he had used to carve the sandwich meat in his kitchen hours earlier in his hand, that he had leaped from his bed in an instinctive state of panic and self-defense, that the two had fought and that in the ensuing struggle, Timothy had fatally fallen on the knife. He would later revise this statement to claim he had leaped from his bed and charged at the teenager, who had seemed both surprised and frightened at his impulsive reaction.In Gacy's revised account of the events of the morning of January 3, Timothy had been walking towards his bed with the knife in his hand at approximately 7:30 a.m.; he had instinctively held up the knife to protect himself as Gacy jumped from his bed and reached for his wrist, accidentally cutting Gacy's arm as the teenager asked, "What are you doing?" After observing the slash wound to his arm, Gacy claimed to have "felt a surge of power from my toes to my brain"; he then grabbed Timothy and threw him against the wall, causing him to drop the knife and slide to the floor. The teenager then kicked Gacy in the stomach, doubling him over. Gacy then shouted, "Motherfucker! I'll kill you!" before straddling the teenager and repeatedly stabbing him in the chest—experiencing an orgasm as he did so.
As Timothy lay dying, Gacy washed the knife in the bathroom sink, then walked into the kitchen to place the knife "where it belonged" as he listened to the "never-ending gurgulations" emanating from the bedroom. Here, he saw a carton of eggs and a slab of unsliced bacon on the counter and that the teenager had set the table for two. Timothy had simply intended to walk into Gacy's bedroom to wake him while absentmindedly carrying the knife.
Reflecting on his revised account of Timothy's death in the mid-1980s, Gacy remarked: "See? He wasn't trying to outsmart me at all; he was trying to do something nice."
Burial
After Timothy succumbed to his knife wounds, Gacy cleaned all traces of blood from the crime scene, then dragged the teenager's body to the crawl space beneath his home before gathering, then disposing of his clothing and personal possessions. He then drove to a scheduled family wake for his Aunt Pearl, who had died of natural causes at age 74 four days previously.Gacy later dug a shallow grave close to a support pillar in the crawl space and buried Timothy's remains face-down in this location. Six months later, Gacy married his fiancée, who repeatedly complained of a foul odor emanating from the crawl space and the presence of gnats in the utility room, which Gacy alternately blamed on dead mice and a likely broken sewer pipe. He periodically spread bags of lime in the crawl space in efforts to both combat the odor and hasten decomposition before covering the grave with a 4" thick layer of concrete on an occasion his wife and stepdaughters were visiting relatives in late 1972.
Initial investigation
By prearrangement, on the afternoon of January 3, Timothy's aunt drove to the bus depot in Omaha to pick up her nephew. Although the bus Timothy was expected to arrive upon arrived on schedule, her nephew was not among the departing passengers. A phone call to relatives in Lansing confirmed Timothy had boarded a bus at the Capital Area Multimodal Gateway the previous day.As the year progressed, Timothy's family became increasingly concerned as they heard nothing further from him as although the teenager was somewhat footloose, he was close to his family, had never run away from home, and invariably maintained contact with his relatives. His father ultimately hired a Chicago-based private investigator, who was unable to establish any firm leads as to Timothy's whereabouts. Nonetheless, as the teenager had traveled extensively across America in his lifetime, some relatives held onto hope he had simply chosen to continue traveling across the country on his own and would someday re-initiate contact.
In March 1973, Timothy's grandfather, Bain Study, died of natural causes in Iowa at the age of 82. When Timothy failed to show up at the funeral, these members of his family also lost all hope that he would ever return.