GUEST: Karen Conti, John Wayne Gacy's Death Row Attorney

What is it actually like to sit across a prison table from John Wayne Gacy, week after week, as the lawyer trying to keep him alive?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussion of serial murder, the sexual assault and killing of teenage boys and young men, and the death penalty. Listener discretion is advised.

Karen Conti is a Chicago trial attorney who spent seven months representing John Wayne Gacy during his final death row appeals, the only woman among the lawyers who worked his case across his fourteen years on death row. She is the author of Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: Defending America's Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row, a professor who has taught law for more than twenty-five years at DePaul and the University of Illinois, host of The Karen Conti Show on WGN, and a legal analyst who has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Court TV and the Today Show.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy ask her the questions a clinician wants answered and a journalist usually doesn't; what he was like in the room, what it costs a person to defend someone they find repellent, and how you hold a professional duty toward a man whose crimes you cannot look away from.

In this episode:

• Karen Conti on representing John Wayne Gacy in his final death row appeals
• What Gacy was actually like across months of face-to-face visits
• Being the only woman on his legal team, in a case and a profession that made that difficult
• Opposing the death penalty while representing the man most people would make an exception for
• Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy — the memoir, and why she waited to write it
• What a defense attorney carries afterwards

Clinical concepts discussed: psychopathy · antisocial personality disorder · charm as a predatory tool · compartmentalization · vicarious trauma and moral injury in legal and clinical work · the ethics of representing someone you find abhorrent · the psychology of capital punishment

More guest episodes:

• S8E11 - Ann Burgess, FBI criminal profiling pioneer
• S7E54 - Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer — the Ann Burgess documentary

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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