New Victim of John Wayne Gacy, a Serial Killer Identified Using DNA | Illinois

Illinois officials said on Monday they identified another victim of John Wayne GacyWas convicted of killing 33 young men and boys in the 1970s.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said Francis Wayne Alexander, a North Carolina man who moved to Chicago, was 21 or 22 when Gacy killed him between early 1976 and early 1977. I told reporters.

In a statement, Alexander’s sister, Carolyn Sanders, thanked the sheriff’s office for giving the family some “closure.”

“It’s hard to know the fate of our beloved Wayne, even 45 years later,” Sanders said. “He was killed by the hands of a vulgar and evil man. Our hearts are heavy and our sympathy is directed at the families of other victims … We are now by honoring Wayne. You can rest what happened and move forward. “

Alexander’s body was one of 26 sets of police found in the crawl space under Gacy’s house on the outskirts of Chicago. Three victims were found buried in Gacy’s property, and the other four, who Gacy admitted to killing, were found in a waterway south of Chicago.

In 2011, Dart’s office unearthed the bodies of eight victims who were buried without knowing who the police were. Darts called on men to submit their DNA to those who disappeared in the Chicago area in the 1970s.

Within a few weeks, the sheriff’s office announced that it had identified a set of bodies as belonging to 19-year-old construction worker William Bandy.

In 2017, the office identified the second set as that of 16-year-old Jimmy Harkenson. He called his Minnesota mother and told her she was in Chicago before disappearing.

The details of Alexander’s life in Chicago are sketchy. He first moved to New York, then to Chicago, where he married for about three months and then divorced in 1975.

According to the sheriff’s office, the last known record of Alexander’s life was a traffic ticket received in Chicago in January 1976. He made little money this year.

How he crossed the road The most notorious serial killer It’s a mystery in American history. Authorities only know that “Alexander lived in an area where Gacy visited frequently and other identified victims previously lived.”

Alexander was identified when the sheriff’s department worked with the nonprofit DNA Doe Project. This project uses genetic information to identify unidentified relatives of the dead.

The organization compared the DNA profile from the bodies of unidentified victims with the profile on the genealogy website. It led to Alexander’s family, and Alexander’s mother and half-parents provided DNA for comparison.

Among genetic tests, financial records, post-mortem reports, and other information, investigators were able to confirm that the body belonged to Alexander.

DNA submissions from people suspected of killing Gacy’s loved ones helped police resolve at least 11 cold cases unrelated to Gacy’s execution in 1994.

It also helped find a loved one who lived during the missing, including an Oregon man who didn’t know his family was looking for him.

New Victim of John Wayne Gacy, a Serial Killer Identified Using DNA | Illinois

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