CHICAGO, FOR FOREIGNERS and others who have never ventured near the heartland, is Crime City. It has always been. The image was born of such fugures as Al Capone and Leopold and Loeb; it lives on in the person of one John Wayne Gacy. Newspapers thrive on images--especially the sensationalistic kind that can dislocate even a City of the Big Shoulders like Chicago. So when Gacy catapulted past Elmer Wayne Henley, Dean Corll and Juan Corona last month to become the most prolific accused mass murderer in modern history, the story was a big one for Chicago, the biggest since Mayor Daley died two Christmases ago.

The Windy City's grand tradition of grisly journalism reasserted itself with a vengeance. Two of the city's four major dailies have folded in the past few years, but the Tribune and Sun Times came through in classic Front Page form. On Christmas Eve, as workers began removing the first of 27 young male bodies from the crawlspace in John Gacy's basement, the old-fashioned battle was on. Until the New Year began, each day brought a new banner headline with either the words "Gacy" or "Body," or both, in it.

Within days Chicagoans were fully briefed on every sickening detail of the brawny contractor's Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde past. His friends and neighbors knew him as a kind, gregarious man who would bring them baskets of fruit as presents, shovel their walks unasked, throw enormous backyard parties for hundreds of friends. The papers ran blow-ups of a card identifying him as a Democratic precinct captain, accolades from fellow Jaycee club members and testimonials from friends who had benefited from Gacy's generosity.

And yet as the reporters and gawkers staked out his home near suburban Norridge the other side began to come out--the bags of lime he always seemed to be carrying into the house, the noise of construction work filtering out from his basement, the young boys the mailman and others always saw around the house. Someone told the papers about a fire in the garage (where a couple of bodies were later discovered). A nude Gacy, afraid the bodies would be found, ran frantically from the shower to put it out himself before firemen arrived, readers were informed.

THE PAPERS INTERVIEWED the weeping parents of the victims, who blamed shoddy police work. They talked to his ex-wife, who divorced him after finding he "liked boys better." The reporting spread to other states. Authorities sought links to missing youths in Wisconsin, and the CBS-TV Chicago outlet ran a special report called "The House on Summerdale St." in which they stuck a microphone in the face of the Iowa judge who had presided when Gacy was convicted for sodomy several years ago. The judge was lying flat on his back in the hospital but the T.V. reporters were undeterred. They created a model of the Gacy home and pointed to where the bodies were buried. They brought a model skull into the newsroom and pointed to how the young victims could be identified.

The Sun-Times virtually opened a Summerdale St. bureau. Reporters were on hand around the clock to file accounts of how it all looked--and smelled. On December 29, one of the paper's top columnists, Roger Simon, landed an exclusive interview with Dr. Robert Stein, the talkative medical examiner who by week's end was practically a household name in Chicago. Stein, who supervised the excavations, posed on the front page before a stack of sheet-covered bodies in Crypt One of the Cook County morgue.

"Now it's a maze down there," Stein told the Sun-Times, "A maze. But the things in the maze are not marbles or checkers. They are bodies, the bodies of young men." The coroner went on. "People are now wondering, looking. You go have a beer at a tavern, and you look down the bar, and you see some ordinary guy. And you wonder, how many bodies does he have buried?"

The next day the Tribune grabbed Stein for an interview, and the electronic media soon followed. Not to be outdone, the Trib pulled a scoop of its own: An enormous page one photograph of Gacy chained to his jail bed. The guard who sold the photo to the paper was fired. On New Year's Eve, both papers ran special sections. The Sun-Times's "Weird World of John Wayne Gacy" featured an interview with a teenage male whore named Jaime who remembered seeing Gacy cruise the gay bars on the Near North Side. Gacy once picked him up in a place called Bughouse Square, and Jaime barely escaped with his life. After such homosexual encounters, the paper reported, Gacy would head uptown to a favored working-class bar called The Good Luck Lounge, where he would drink with his buddies and sometimes ride around taunting gays.

SOON THE NEWSPAPERS were covering press conferences held by gay leaders protesting the bad name homosexuality was getting from the case. Other news conferences followed. Gacy had entertained young children as "Pogo the Clown." A spokesman for the Clown Guild called reporters together to declare that Gacy was not in the union, but rather "a free-lance artist." The spokesman noted that bookings for clowns in the Chicago area were down because mothers felt their children were scared after seeing photographs of Gacy in costume. On the whole, however, there was no real sense of city wide fear, no Son-of-Sam-where-will-he-strike-next terror. What the press pandered to instead was fascination with the macabre. Traffic around the Gacy home was very heavy. On New Year's Day, far more Chicagoans knew how many people Gacy allegedly killed (32) than that the U.S. would forthwith conduct diplomatic relations with China (one billion).

That phenomenon is nothing new in American journalism. It is, after all, the John Wayne Gacys of this world who help keep most newspapers solvent. In this sense, the massive publicity surrounding the case is not particularly surprising. The Chicago press cannot disseminate its sensationalism across the nation in the same way New York does, but the ability to exploit the gruesome hasn't changed much over the years--even in college newspapers.