When you're running for president, attention gets paid to your every word – as Michele Bachmann found out when she mistakenly compared herself to a notorious serial killer instead of Hollywood legend John Wayne.

In an interview before announcing her bid for the Republican presidential nomination in her birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa, Bachmann told a Fox News interviewer:

John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That's the kind of spirit that I have, too.

Except as the conservative Washington Times reported, John Wayne – the star of movies such as True Grit and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – was born in Winterset, Iowa, more than 100 miles away from Waterloo. The John Wayne of Waterloo was someone entirely different:

Waterloo's John Wayne was not the beloved movie star, but rather John Wayne Gacy, the homophobic serial killer.

Oh, that John Wayne. As Minnesota's City Pages details:

The only famous John Wayne from Waterloo was one of the most deranged murderers in American history – the "Killer Clown" himself, John Wayne Gacy. Gacy's first arrest happened in Waterloo, after two teenage boys accused him of sexually assaulting them. After spending less than two years in prison for sodomy, he went back to Waterloo, then brutally raped and murdered 33 boys and young men over a period of six years, stashing the bodies in crawl spaces, his basement or dumping them in a river. He was executed in 1994.

Rather than just admitting to making a minor mistake, the Bachmann campaign has made a lame attempt to justify the candidate's words: "John Wayne is from Iowa, his parents lived in Waterloo."



Welcome to the big leagues, as they say. Bachmann thus joins the ranks of presidential candidates who have made gaffes over the years, including Barack Obama – who famously claimed to have visited 57 states during the 2008 campaign.

The worst gaffe made on the campaign trail was the Republican running for the presidential nomination in 1967, who said he had been "brainwashed" into supporting the Vietnam war. The candidate? George Romney, father of Mitt Romney.