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January 24th | 7pm CST

Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders | Courtney Lund O’Neil

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ABOUT THE BOOK

“A beautifully written memoir about the haunting impact of a sensational crime. I’m still thinking about it.” -Gregg Olsen, #1New York Times bestselling author

Behind the sensational true crime documentaries of murders and serial killers are real people–frightened, shocked, stricken survivors–who face psychological scars, which ripple out to the people closest to them.

A mother’s trauma and her daughter’s quest for answers in the nightmarish wake of an incomprehensible crime combine in POSTMORTEM (on saleDecember24, 2024). In this compelling narrative that blends memoir, biography, and literary journalism, author Courtney Lund O’Neil recounts her mother Kim Byers’ close brush with one of America’s most dangerous serial killers, John Wayne Gacy. O’Neil illuminates how that hair’s breadth proximity to a single act of senseless violence causes several lifetimes worth of damage.

In 1978, then-17-year-old Kim Byers slipped a film receipt into the coat pocket of her work colleague and friend, Rob Piest. She had borrowed the jacket earlier in their shift at Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines, IL. Piest was wearing the coat when he was murdered by Gacy later that night, and that little receipt would be the leading piece of evidence to convict Gacy.

Byers’ life would never be the same. The prime witness of a shocking murder, Byers would essentially become another victim. Instead of living out a carefree adulthood, she would be haunted by the murders. While Gacy sat in jail, the general public became fascinated by the man who painted clowns and killed 33 young men, Byers struggled to make sense of what had happened to her. O’Neil’s narrative pulls from archival materials, newspapers, published books, public records, yearbooks, oral histories, documentaries, and interviews. She spent seven years conducting research, and dissecting memories of her mother and the impact these murders hold on their family life.

While the media builds up and fetishizes sensational murder cases like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and The Golden Gate Killer, their repulsive crimes somehow warranting them celebrity status, O’Neil posits that culture’s focus is wrong. We should be looking to the victims, survivors, and what lives on long after a murderer is caught. O’Neil upends the traditional true crime narrative by focusing the story on her own mother and her relationship with Gacy’s final victim. O’Neil searches for answers to how this murder case has affected her mother and family, the unassuming town of Des Plaines, and the larger American psyche. What O’Neil discovers is that everyone is affected. Like a car crash, crime extends out beyond the victim to impact parents, siblings, friends, partners, neighbors, authorities, attorneys, and everyone who has touched the case.What survives murder is a haunting.

A brave, disturbing, foray into the reality of evil and a moving, honest story of one family’s survival in the aftermath of horror, POSTMORTEM is a compulsively readable account of trauma’s undeniable impact onfamily, community, andgenerations. The book’s chilling ending brings the trauma full circle. In O’Neil’s quest for answers, she understands the story cannot leave her.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Courtney Lund O’Neil teaches at the University of California, San Diego. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, The Washington Post, Oprah Daily, Parents, Chicago Tribune, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. The recipient of the Marcia McQuern Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction, and the Marye Lynn Cummings Endowed Scholarship in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry, she holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University and an MFA from University of California, Riverside. She lives with her husband and children in Southern California.