Clowns. Like their archetypal cousins, the Fool, the Trickster and the Jester, the Clown is a sacred dissident, if you will, an honored and seemingly benign transgressor, playfully defying our conceptions of appropriate behavior. The clown invites you to relax your grip on the socially constructed self, and embrace the chaos that lies beyond the carefully maintained predictability of your life. It is the clown's presumable ignorance of his own power to dissolve boundaries that once made him such a beguiling and innocuous figure. And while there are still those today who remember and try to preserve the special magic of the clown, Recent decades have seen a more disturbing image take hold in the popular imagination. For all too many of us, the superimposed smile painted on his face belies a potentially more sinister set of intensions lurking behind his jovial appearance. While depictions of evil clowns can be found dating back centuries, there is one real-life person who can be credited more than any other with the clowns fall into disrepute, and his name is John Wayne Gacy.