Inside unseen photos from John Wayne Gacy’s warped memento collection – & the unspeakable reason he kept items

He said he "enjoyed the attention" and boasted he would look like a "millionaire".

So it appears his stashing of shiny objects taken from his victims may have been him indulging his passion.

You dug with a very small gardening tool and then you used your hands

Rafael Tovar

Police also found Gacy's preferred tools of torture including handcuffs, metal chains and padlocks he'd use to tie up his victims before raping them and strangling them to death.

Gacy - dubbed the "killer clown" because he dressed in clown makeup for charity events, as well as during some of his crimes - lured victims to his home and duped them into wearing handcuffs as part of a 'magic trick' before killing them.

He deceived many of his victims by telling them he needed their help with “scientific research”, for which he would pay them up to $50 each.

After luring the boys to his house, through lies or at gunpoint, Gacy would then ply them with alcohol and trick them into putting on handcuffs, occasionally as part of his clown routine.

Then, once they were defenceless, he would torment his teenage victims, before raping them and finishing with what he called “the rope trick”: strangling the boys with a length of rope.

Mr Tovar and his team spent six months in dark, cold and cramped conditions clearing the crawl space at Gacy's home.

Two of Mr Tovar's men would go on off the rails years later while others struggled to process the horror scenes of bodies stacked on bodies.

Officers dug up corpses whose heads had detached themselves from the spine because of the way Gacy strangled them. Others were in such a state they couldn't be identified, according to Mr Tovar.

"He had them all around the outer edges of the house and he had dug up some trenches. Some of them he put one on top of the other," the retired detective explained.

"It was very wet, very moist down there. You couldn’t dig with a shovel because we were afraid of breaking a bone or knocking some teeth out because that was the only way we were going to identify them, so you dug with a very small gardening tool and then you used your hands."

Officers arrived at Gacy's Illinois property one cold winter's day following a tip-off that Robert Piest, a 15-year-old boy who went missing at the time, had followed Gacy home on December 11, 1978.

Though the search failed to turn up the boy, one of the officers noticed the smell of rotting flesh coming from Gacy's heating system, which ran from an underground crawl space.

Des Plaines police returned with a second search warrant and began digging. What they experienced that day would turn their lives upside down.

Among the first finds the seasoned officers discovered was a left femur. Cops tore up Gacy's floor to find more rotting bodies scattered around the home.

Gacy had poured quicklime over his victims to speed up the decomposition process but once officers cut through that "there was a putrid odour, unlike anything else", Mr Tovar said.

When investigators told Gacy they planned on digging up his crawl space, he immediately cooperated and drew them a map pinpointing all the bodies.

Mr Tovar said Gacy told officers he wanted them "to be careful because I don’t want you to dirty up my carpets so I'll tell you exactly where everything is".

"It’s a dodgy thing to say. There were 29 bodies in the house!

"He had absolutely no feelings whatsoever about human life. For him, killing an individual was like stepping on an ant. He had no moral fibre whatsoever."

Gacy was eventually convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Despite being sentenced to death in 1980, he wasn't executed until 1994, after he exhausted all his appeals.

He died at the Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, on May 10, 1994.