CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart calls it a new frontier: the “genetic genealogy” that he hopes will help identify hundreds of missing persons in the county.
It was this genetic genealogy that led to the announcement Monday that Sheriff Tom Dart’s office had identified another victim of John Wayne Gacy.
For 43 years, law enforcement referred to him as “Gacy Victim Number 5.” Now, he has been identified as Wayne Alexander; thanks to the DNA Doe Project, which homed-in on him after a second cousin - likely one who never met Wayne Alexander and didn’t know he was missing - uploaded DNA to a genealogy-based website, GEDmatch, that law enforcement has been tapping into more and more.
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Sheriff Tom Dart said this can help identify the remaining five un-ID’d Gacy victims.
“But the big thing for me was for the many, many hundreds of missing people that we have just in our county alone…” who, Dart said, may have been buried in Cook County as unidentified indigents.
Meanwhile, late last week, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office notified Alexander's family in North Carolina, who never reported him missing. According to investigators, they thought he just wanted to be left alone.
But Sheriff’s Lieutenant Jason Moran said when he met with the family last Friday to tell them that Alexander was one of John Wayne Gacy’s 33 victims, five generations of the family gathered in one room to hear the news: a meeting, he said, was sensitive and emotional.
“And it’s one thing we took into consideration when we decided to reopen the case. Are we causing more harm by doing this?" Moran said.
“And every family member we’ve met with, every family we’ve helped, overwhelmingly said it’s better to know than not know, even if the news is, your loved one was killed by an evil man.”