CHICAGO — More than 30 years after a collection of skeletal remains was found beneath John Wayne Gacy’s house, detectives have secretly exhumed bones of eight young men who were never identified in hopes of answering a final question: Who were they?
The Cook County Sheriff’s Department says DNA testing could solve the last remaining mystery of one of the nation’s worst serial killers, and authorities on Wednesday asked for the public’s help in determining the victims’ names.
Investigators are urging relatives of anyone who disappeared between 1970 and Gacy’s 1978 arrest - and still unaccounted for - to undergo saliva tests to compare their DNA with that of the skeletal remains.
Detectives think the passage of time might actually work in their favor. Some families who never reported the victims missing and never searched for them could be willing to do so now, a generation after Gacy’s homosexuality and pattern of preying on vulnerable teens were splashed across newspapers all over the world.
“I’m hoping the stigma has lessened, that people can put family disagreements and biases against sexual orientation [and] drug use behind them to give these victims a name,” Detective Jason Moran said in one of several interviews he and others in the sheriff’s office gave to the Associated Press before the department disclosed the exhumations publicly.
Added Sheriff Tom Dart: “There are a million different reasons why someone hasn’t come forward. Maybe they thought their son ran off to work in an oil field in Canada. Who knows?”
After so many years, the relatives could be anywhere, so the sheriff’s department is setting up a phone bank to field calls from across the country.
Gacy, who is remembered as one of history’s most bizarre killers largely because of his work as an amateur clown, was convicted of murdering 33 young men, sometimes luring them to his Chicago-area home for sex by impersonating a police officer or promising them construction work. He stabbed one and strangled the others between 1972 and 1978. Most were buried in a crawl space under his home. Four others were dumped in a river.
He was executed in 1994, but the anguish caused by his crimes still resounds today.
Just days ago, a judge granted a request to exhume one victim whose mother doubted the medical examiner’s conclusion that her son’s remains were found under Gacy’s house. Sheriff Dart said other families have the same need for certainty.
“They were young men with futures, who at some point had families that cared about their kid,” he said. Until the dead are identified, “it’s like they didn’t even exist.”
The plan began unfolding earlier in the year, when detectives were trying to identify some human bones found scattered at a forest preserve. They started reviewing other cases of unidentified remains, which led them back to Gacy.
“I completely forgot or didn’t know there were all these unidentifieds,” Sheriff Dart said.
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