This week I conducted an investigation into why people are afraid of clowns, following a famous serial murder by clowns in the United States. The killer’s name was John Wayne Gacy. He was a psychopath who had been in prison twice but had been released for good behavior. But at heart, he was profoundly psychologically troubled, perhaps because he had a dark childhood.

He often gained the trust of teenagers by acting as a clown, then lured them into his home to be tortured and killed. One of his most infamous ways of binding his victims was convincing them to allow him to handcuff them under the pretense that it was part of a magic trick Gacy would often stick paper towels or clothing (such as a sock or often their own underwear) in their mouths to muffle their screams causing them to fatally asphyxiate. He would also kill his victims by stranging them with a rope or a board as he sexually assaulted them with sex toys, then bury the bodies in his crawlspace to hasten the decomposition of the bodies.

So a lot of people still see clowns and associate them with murder.

I think in this part of the research, I will combine stories with clothes in the future, for example, adding binding elements or creating a feeling of being bound.