Karen Conti was a fledgling lawyer in the early 1990s when she was asked to defend John Wayne Gacy, but she wanted “to look evil in the eye,” so she took the case.

As a fierce opponent of the death penalty, Conti became the only female lawyer on his death row defense team, which led to hours of talks with the “Killer Clown.”

“Gacy wasn’t scary,” Conti said during a March 10 segment on WGN Radio in Chicago, when asked if it was like a “Silence of Lambs” scene. “Gacy wasn’t scary… He was such an average guy, and he appeared to be friendly and glib and intelligent and engaging, and that’s obviously why he got away with so many (murders).

“Nobody could rectify who he was. In his one life, his normal, church-going business, charitable, political life. And then that horrible side of him that did some of the most evil acts I’ve ever even imagined.”

A barren plot of land is an uncomfortable reminder of the “house of horrors” home of John Wayne Gacy that once stood there. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

But she got the impression that he wanted to be caught by police, and he was “relieved” to be behind bars, otherwise he would kill again. 

“He was in a frenzy (when he was arrested),” Conti said. “A lot of serial killers, they start out killing once a year, then it ramps up, and they need more violence, they need more victims,” Conti said. “So I think Gacy, at the end, it was just wearing at him.

“And I think he knew if he was ever out again, he would go back to killing.”

She said he was sexually abused, had head injuries as a kid and had repressed homosexual tendencies. 

With the murders, “I think he was trying to almost kill himself over and over,” she said.