In 1994, journalist Nancy Rommelmann accompanied Rick Gaez, a 26-year-old pen pal of John Wayne Gacy, on a road trip from Los Angeles to Illinois, to visit the serial killer before his execution. Along the way, she took the moral temperature of people on college campuses, in bars, in churches, asking how they felt about Gacy and his being sentenced to death, for the torture and murder of 33 young men and teenage boys. Shackled in a tiny visiting room on death row, Gacy nevertheless turned on the charm. Chatty, slick, acting the father figure, albeit one who wants to know a little too much about your sex life, Gacy offered his hand and said, "Ask anything you want—I'm not ashamed of anything I've ever done."

Nancy Rommelmann's features, book reviews, and essays appear in the Wall Street Journal, the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, the Oregonian, Reason, Byliner, and other publications. Recent books include the novel The Bad Mother (2011). The Queens of Montague Street (2012), a digital memoir of growing up in Brooklyn Heights in the 1970s, was excerpted by the New York Times Magazine and named one of the Top Ten Longreads of 2012. Rommelmann's story collection Transportation was released in 2013.

Read more about the author at Nancyrommelmann.com or follow her on Twitter @NancyRomm.

This is a short e-book published by Shebooks—high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women. For more information, visit shebooks.net.