Nisson Pharmacy

This is the former Nisson Pharmacy.

It is located at 1920 East Touhy Avenue in Des Plaines, Illinois.

These days, it is the address of a daycare center.

On Monday, December 11th, 1978, serial killer John Wayne Gacy visited the pharmacy to discuss a remodeling job with the owner, Phil Torf. While he was in the store, he saw a 15-year-old part-time clerk named Robert Piest.

Upon noticing Piest, he loudly stated that his construction firm, PDM Contractors, paid teenagers $5 per hour.

This piqued the boy's interest, as he was only earning $2.50 per hour at the pharmacy.

Piest later agreed to meet with Gacy outside the pharmacy so that they could discuss a job. Before leaving the store, he told one of his coworkers that he was meeting with "the contractor."

Piest accompanied Gacy back to his home. Once they were inside the house, Gacy tricked him into putting on a pair of handcuffs. He then tortured him, strangled him with a rope, and stuffed a paper-like material down his throat.

Following the murder, Gacy drove to the I-55 bridge and dumped Piest's body in the Des Moines River.

By that point, there were so many victims buried in his crawlspace that he had no more room. As a result, he began dumping the bodies in the Des Moines River.

When Piest's mother arrived at Nisson Pharmacy to pick up her son, she was told that he had left to meet with a contractor.

It was soon determined that the contractor in question was John Wayne Gacy.

This poorly thought-out abduction proved to be the beginning of the end for Gacy, as he quickly became the prime suspect in Piest's disappearance.

Although he denied talking to the victim, investigators became suspicious after they ran a background check and discovered that he had sexually assaulted a teenage boy in Iowa ten years previously.

In the days that followed, they also learned that a number of his former workers had gone missing.

After putting Gacy under surveillance, questioning his associates, and getting a search warrant, the police eventually dug up his crawlspace and unearthed human remains.