CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO/AP) — The Cook County Sheriff’s Office has identified another victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, the Norwood Park man who was executed in 1994 for the murders of 33 young men and boys in the 1970s.
For four years now there have been six unidentified victims.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said one of the six remaining unnamed victims has been identified with the assistance of genetic genealogy.
According to Sheriff Dart, Francis Wayne Alexander would have been 21 or 22 years old when Gacy killed him sometime between early 1976 and early 1977.
Alexander’s remains were among 26 sets that police found in the crawl space under Gacy's home just outside the city on Dec. 26, 1978. Three victims, meanwhile, were found buried on Gacy's property and four others whom Gacy admitted killing were found in waterways south of Chicago.
The sheriff’s office said Alexander was born in North Carolina, and then moved to New York, got married, and moved to Chicago; and then divorced in 1975, three months after his marriage.
According to the sheriff’s office’s news release, the last known record of Alexander’s life was a traffic ticket he received in Chicago in January of 1976 — a year in which he earned little money. How he crossed paths with one of the most notorious serial killers in American history is a mystery, as authorities say all they know is that “Alexander lived in an area that was frequented by Gacy and where other identified victims had previously lived."
In a statement, Alexander’s sister, Carolyn Sanders, thanked the sheriff’s office for giving the family some level of “closure.”
“It is hard, even 45 years later, to know the fate of our beloved Wayne,” Sanders wrote. “He was killed at the hands of a vile and evil man. Our hearts are heavy, and our sympathies go out to the other victims’ families.Our only comfort is knowing this killer no longer breathes the same air as we do...We can now lay to rest what happened and move forward by honoring Wayne.”
In 2011, Dart's office exhumed the remains of eight victims, including Alexander, who had been buried without police knowing who they were. Dart called on anyone who had a male relative disappear in the Chicago area in the 1970s to submit DNA. That was the time when Gacy was luring young men and boys to his home to eventually kill them.
Within weeks, the sheriff's office announced that it had identified one set of remains as those of William Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.
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In 2017, the office identified a second set as those of 16-year-old Jimmy Haakenson, who disappeared after he phoned his mother in Minnesota and told her that he was in Chicago.
The submission of DNA from people who suspected Gacy might have killed their loved ones has helped police solve at least 11 cold cases of homicides that had nothing to do with Gacy, who was executed in 1994. It has also helped families find loved ones who while missing, were alive, including a man in Oregon who had no idea his family was looking for him.
There are now five unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy.
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(WBBM Newsradio andThe Associated Press contributed to this copy.)