U.S. High Court Rejects Gacy’s Execution Stay : Appeal: Rebuff is second in day. Another plea by man convicted of killing 33 boys and young men is now before Illinois Supreme Court.

JOLIET, Ill. — The U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed an eleventh-hour effort Monday by lawyers for John Wayne Gacy to halt his execution, more than a decade after the gruesome discovery of a makeshift graveyard under his home led to his conviction for murdering 33 young men and boys.

Gacy, 52, was scheduled to die by injection shortly after 12:01 a.m. today at the maximum-security Stateville Correctional Center, 35 miles southwest of Chicago.

A three-judge federal appeals court panel in Chicago rejected an earlier effort Monday to block the execution. Gacy’s lawyers had another appeal pending before the state Supreme Court, however.

Earlier Monday, in downtown Chicago, hundreds of singing, laughing people, some wearing party hats and others dressed as clowns, marched through downtown in celebration of the impending execution.

Gacy was convicted in March, 1980, in one of the nation’s worst serial killing cases. Most of the bodies were found buried in the crawl space beneath his ranch-style Norwood Park home.

Families of Gacy’s victims maintained a tense vigil waiting for word of his death.

“We’ve been waiting for this for 14 years and when it’s over with it will be a relief,” said Harold Piest, father of Gacy’s last victim, Robert Piest, whose disappearance led to Gacy’s arrest.

In Chicago, the execution celebration, called a “Gacy Day Parade,” was put together by Don Wade, an on-air personality at WLS radio in Chicago.

“We want America to see how most people feel about criminals,” Wade told the crowd from his perch on the base of a large outdoor Picasso sculpture that dominates Daley Plaza.

The crowd engulfed a lonely stand of about eight death penalty protesters and swamped a previously scheduled D-Day 50th anniversary musical celebration, where a young man dressed in a World War II sailor’s uniform crooned “I’ll Be Seeing You” and other period pieces, trying vainly to be heard above the roar of the Gacy crowd.

Dozens in that crowd carried signs reading “Gacy--stick it to him,” in reference to the lethal injection. Others sang: “Well Hello Gacy, it’s so nice to have you right where you belong,” to the tune “Hello Dolly.”

Gacy was flown to Stateville by helicopter early Monday from the Menard Correctional Center in Southern Illinois, where he spent 14 years and two months in a windowless cell on Death Row.

Gacy had asked to meet with relatives and a priest, and requested a last meal of fried chicken, french fries and fresh strawberries, Corrections Department spokesman Nic Howell said.

Six law enforcement officials and a dozen reporters were invited to witness the execution. Prison officials barred both of Gacy’s relatives and the families of his victims from the execution chamber, citing security reasons.

Gacy’s plea to the federal appeals court contended, among other things, that he is mentally incompetent, that the state’s execution method is unconstitutional and that he was out of town when 16 of the murders were committed.