Ryan Graveface’s interest in John Wayne Gacy murders sparks True Crime Convention
Serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed on May 10, 1994, but for local self-proclaimed “psycho detective” Ryan Graveface, the death of one of America’s most notorious pedophiles and murderers is far from the end of the story.
“I can simplify it by saying everything that you and the general public knows about Gacy is incorrect and invalid,” he said.
To set the record straight, Ryan and his wife/business partner Chloë Manon have organized Graveface Museum’s inaugural “True Crime Convention” for May 11, a day-long series of presentations that they’re calling a “Case Study” of the life and crimes of Gacy.
“When I started doing independent research, the information was so next level,” Graveface went on to explain. “It started to dawn on me, and this is after 10 years of heavy-duty research, that everything we know is just [BS]. And so you’ve got to wonder, ‘Why is that? Why is the narrative we’ve been told for 40 years so specific and so wrong?’”
Walking In Bloody Footsteps
Graveface’s interest in the subject isn’t for fame or fortune, or to sensationalize Gacy’s horrific crimes. His connection to the serial killer who dressed like a clown started when he moved to the Norwood Park neighborhood in Chicago after secondary school, where he quickly discovered that he was surrounded by victims of Gacy’s crimes. Stepping outside his front door was Taft High School, where several of the madman’s victims were discovered to have attended, and it seemed like everyone he met had a story to tell about the killer.
“Every time I would talk about Gacy, it would come up organically,” Graveface recalled. “‘I used to go to his house, and he was so nice.’ It just planted a seed. I’m in this neighborhood where people are talking about traumas or [being] close to traumas so casually, because everyone has them.”
Back then, it was just a curiosity for the man known more for his music than his investigative journalism, rather than a story to dig deeply into. He did, however, pick up a couple of Gacy’s famous paintings, as well as a journal/log book Gacy kept to describe his days. The former would be the beginnings of what is now the largest collection of the serial killer’s paintings owned by anyone, and the latter would serve as inspiration for a double record by his band Dreamend, “So I Ate Myself Bite By Bite” and “And The Tears Washed Me, Wave After Cowardly Wave.”
Graveface’s interest in Gacy remained, but it wasn’t until 2015 that the story started to break for him. Several years earlier he’d discovered a YouTube channel run by a man named Andy Matesi, a curio shop owner who’d gotten to know the killer and who recorded more than 10 hours of their private conversations.
“He would…talk for hours about his relationship with Gacy,” Graveface recalled. “He had this bag of tapes that no one’s every heard, and he would play a little clip, and then he would say, ‘I bet you didn’t know these characters, as it pertains to John at all. There’s a larger story here.’ And he kept saying shit like that, and it got me hooked.”
Matesi made it clear that the tapes were for sale, and he gave out his phone number for inquires. Giving him a call, however, Graveface learned that the man was asking for $100,000 for the lot. “I just laughed,” he said. “And I’m like, ‘How ‘bout five hundred bucks?’”
Needless to say, the deal didn’t go through at the time. Fast forward to 2015, however, and Graveface again came across Matesi’s videos and, even though he’d died in 2013, he decided to give the number a call once more. Matesi’s daughter answered, and it turned out that she’d sold everything her father had owned — except for a binder filled with letters to and from Gacy, and the bag of tapes. He bought both for $700.
“It changed everything,” Graveface noted of the collection. “Because basically, it’s Gacy saying all this shit that I’ve never heard him say, in any of the documentaries that have been released over the past forever.”
A ‘Gacy genius’
The tapes weren’t perfect. Manon, who road shotgun with Graveface on many of his expeditions to uncover the hidden truths of Gacy murders, calls them “frequently frustrating” due to Matesi’s poor interviewing skills. But what they did do is provide names to research and details to follow up on, enough, said Graveface, to “whet the appetite.”
“I started doing research on these individual characters,” he said. “And it was like, ‘Ugh, how are these people not known to the Gacy case?’”
The binder full of letters turned out to be invaluable as well, connecting people that hadn’t previously been connected, and allowing Graveface to cross-reference police information with information directly from Gacy and his correspondents.
“Andy Matesi owned a collectibles shop, so he would acquire different true crime [items] from other people,” Manon explained. “So there’s a whole bunch of characters in these letters, and that’s how [Ryan] met a lot of people.”
In the nearly 10 years since the pair got ahold of the tapes and binder, Graveface has interviewed and recorded dozens of people, perused literally tens of thousands of documents, and explored countless sites related to Gacy’s life before and after he became a serial killer. He befriended Gacy’s sister, who passed away earlier this year, and the two toured Chicago and the surrounding region extensively. He’s filmed the first four parts of a 30-part Gacy documentary series, the pilot episode of which will air during the convention. He even owns the rights to Gacy’s name and likeness, as well as an unpublished manuscript he wrote in 1984.
“I’m a Gacy genius,” he said, “which is disturbing to say out loud.”
For both Graveface and Manon, however, it’s not about becoming true crime superstars or painting a picture of Gacy as some sort of misunderstood figure. It’s about the truth, and bringing a measure of closure to the many, many families that the killer clown affected but who never got justice for the ones they loved.
“Finding out something that no one knows, it’s so special,” Manon said. “Just being able to present that to people. It’s become really rewarding. Correcting misinformation…it’s really satisfying.”
“I’m gonna be able to literally change history, bring closure to victims’ families, add names to unidentified victims,” Graveface added. “It’s a big thing.”
For the Savannah Morning News