Ryan Manon has been collecting John Wayne Gacy “murderabilia” for decades. He has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and much of his 44 years, amassing more than 300 original paintings, letters, logbooks and other ephemera connected to Gacy, who raped and murdered 33 young men and boys before burying them in a subterranean crawl space on the Northwest Side.
Manon’s holdings include a lengthy, unpublished death row manuscript Gacy wrote going back to his earliest memories. Manon estimates his collection at 30,000 items, which includes the killer’s brain in a jar in the Chicago suburbs.
“I am definitely sort of the foremost authority on Gacy,” said Manon from his Savannah, Ga. museum-gallery. “Literally I own everything and I know everything.”
It’s an obsession, he says, and it may yet break him.
This week Manon, along with his wife, Chloe Manon, 30, are releasing the first-ever reprint of Gacy’s own 1993 book, “A Question of Doubt.” The book is part of their true crime and oddity empire, which spans two “Graveface” museum-galleries in Chicago and Savannah, Ga. Inside the museums, visitors can find a cornucopia of other items that are weird, strange, awful, fascinating and revolting.
Copies of the book will be available for sale for $40 at 1829 N. Milwaukee Avenue, and online at their website, GravefaceMuseum.com.
The 352-page book, with a press run of 500 copies, is the latest unboxed cultural artifact in the seemingly never-ending fascination with the prolific serial killer. The cold case counts five unidentified victims, and is still open under the jurisdiction of Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart. The book’s publication date of Sunday is also notable: 32 years to the day after the 52-year-old Gacy was executed following his murder conviction in 1980. The book was originally titled “The 34th Victim.”
“The case just never ends,” one of Gacy’s death row attorneys, Karen Conti, said in 2021. “There will always be a fascination with John Wayne Gacy. Always.”
Conti was prophetic. Peacock last fall released a dramatized mini-series “Devil in Disguise”, starring Michael Chernus. It follows the network’s excellent five-part documentary of the same name from 2021, which is largely the work of two Chicagoans, journalist Alison True and producer Tracy Ullman.
The Graveface franchise hopes the book will be “a piece of the puzzle” to what they say are unanswered questions. Having wrangled the book back to life after five years of work, the two sound almost apologetic. Chloe Manon calls the book “annoying”; Ryan Manon calls it full of the convicted killer’s “ramblings.”
But Ryan believed the book rerelease is important so that the legions of Gacy aficionados, amateur sleuths and voyeurs wouldn’t have to shell out more than $2,000 for one of the 500 original copies, he says.
“I’ve never viewed true crime as a way to make money,” he said.
Admittedly, for the few who’ve been able to get their hands on a copy of the original, there’s not much new, except for an introduction by Karen Gacy, who remained close with a brother she nonetheless believed was guilty of murder (she died in 2024). The most interesting things about the book, Ryan said, are the several lengthy excerpts from the trial transcript, which is not publicly available.
The museum proprietor views the book as a bridge to a more lofty goal: his own documentary drawing on extensive materials he bought from the estates of other Gacy confidants, and obtained from Karen Gacy. The highlight is an unpublished 400-page autobiography the convict wrote during his 14-year death row sit at Menard prison on the banks of the Mississippi River in southern Illinois. Ryan said that Rudolph Herzog, a documentarian and son of Werner Herzog, has shown interest, although a finished product awaits sufficient funding for editing.
But for now the Manons find themselves struggling to avoid running out of money, even while they work to open a third museum location in Pine Bluff, Ark.
“We’re in kind of a pickle right now,” Chloe said. “It’s a constant hustle.”
The Bucktown museum, open seven days a week and staffed by an enthusiastic aspiring 23-year-old actress from Kentucky named Shaylee Bowman, is a small window into the offbeat interests of the pair. Besides selling and renting a large collection of hard to find underground and cult horror films and vinyl, the museum has several small rooms with displays on: circus sideshows, cults, the occult, taxidermy, psychiatric wards and other serial killers.
The Gacy room is kitted out as his death row jail cell, with bars and a cot. Gacy paintings, photos and letters cover the walls, while a small monitor silently plays a death row interview. A page from Gacy’s prison logbook shows a jam-packed schedule of phone calls, letter-writing and personal meetings with people like criminology instructor James Sparks.
Gacy ran a virtual mail-order business out of his prison cell and spent hours each day churning out new paintings on commission. He painted an estimated 2,400 canvases during his life and even had a 1-900 pay-per-call phone number. Watching all this money come in, the state of Illinois tried to recoup some of the costs of his prison stay, though it eventually gave up.
But that long residence produced a lot of collectible materials, which appeals to Ryan Manon’s “classic hoarder” instincts. Ryan, whose obsession with the serial killer began as a Chicago teenager, bought his first Gacy painting, a “skull clown” for $500, and later bought the estate of a Gacy collector for $700, which included a cache of audio cassettes.
Watching the market accelerate for Gacy paintings, including bootlegs, Ryan has added to his menu of services authentication of originals using the prison logbook he got from Karen Gacy.
Interest in Gacy does not seem to wane over the years. Cook County Sheriff Dart reopened the case in 2011 and using new DNA technology was able to identify three of the eight remaining unidentified victims, the most recent in 2021.
For his part, Manon believes questions still remain, claiming that there are over 100 Gacy victims, including in other states, and at least seven accomplices who have not been held to account, as well as a much larger pedophile ring that authorities failed to fully investigate.
Cook County Sheriff’s Officer Commander Jason Moran, a 28-year veteran who came up with the idea of reopening the cold case and has been directing the work ever since, said he has investigated those claims and never found sufficient evidence of other Gacy victims, accomplices or connections to a pedophile ring. The DNA work continues to unfold slowly but Morgan says he hopes to identify some or all of the remaining Gacy victims before he retires in a few years.