The remains of a second long-unidentified victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy have been positively identified, the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart made the announcement Wednesday, saying DNA tests had confirmed that James Byron Haakenson, a St. Paul, Minnesota, teenager who disappeared in Chicago in August of 1976, was one of Gacy’s victims.
Haakenson’s mother asked Chicago authorities in 1979 if her son had fallen prey to Gacy, but without dental records no positive identification was possible then, the Tribune noted.
In the fall of 2011, William George Bundy was the first unidentified Gacy victim to be identified through DNA testing. “I always knew he was going to be one of them,” Bundy’s sister, Laura O’Leary, said at the time, the Tribune reported. “But without DNA back then, there was nothing I could really do.”
According to Mr. Dart, six of Gacy’s 33 victims remain unidentified, and authorities are hard at work seeking to conclusively establish the identify of the remaining John Does. “Every family deserves to have closure,” he said, reported the Tribune.
Gacy was executed by lethal injection in May 1994 at age 52.
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
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