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She was a kid, really, the 28-year-old attorney Karen Conti when she came face-to-face with the serial killer John Wayne Gacy and this is what she saw: “His face was ashen, splotchy and bloated. A dimpled chin and several beneath it were wedged against his blue prison-issue shirt. .

.. There was nothing attractive about Gacy and his light blue eyes were somehow flat and lacking in depth or warmth.



” That is how Conti recalls her first encounter with Gacy. It was October 1993 and he was locked on death row in the Menard Correctional Center in downstate Chester, Illinois. Conti, along with her partner in law and life, Greg Adamski, had been contacted to possibly represent him in some civil matters, one of which was fighting the prison’s attempt to from sales of paintings he had created while in jail.

Over the next months she, as the only woman on his legal team, and Adamski would come to know Gacy in close fashion. They met with him often, shared meals, phone calls to their home, banter and personal stories. They would eventually represent Gacy in his last set of death row appeals.

Gacy by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. Adamski and Conti would carry on, cohosting a radio show and otherwise fashioning high-profile legal careers. He died in 2011 and Conti continues as a weekly WGN-AM720 radio host, TV commentator, practicing attorney and professor.

Happily remarried, she was compelled during the quiet of the pandemic to revisit her time wi.

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