40 years later, six victims of John Wayne Gacy are still unidentified
Since his department's initial attempts seven years ago to identify the remaining unknown victims of convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says some have suggested those efforts waste money and resources.
Dart disagrees.
"I didn't realize there was a time limit when we stopped caring about the victims of homicide," he said.
Now, on the anniversary of Gacy's arrest on Dec. 21, 1978, for the murder of Maine West High School sophomore Robert Piest, Dart once again seeks the public's help.
The deaths of 33 young men eventually were tied to Gacy.
Four decades later, six still have not been identified.
Dart asks anyone with a blood relative who went missing between 1970 and 1978 and who fits the profile of a young, white male to provide a DNA sample in the hope of finally identifying the six victims.
In 1978, Gacy's Norwood Park Township home revealed horrible secrets. Authorities found 26 bodies in the crawl space and three others elsewhere on Gacy's property. Four were found in the Des Plaines River. A jury convicted Gacy of the murders in 1980. He was executed by lethal injection in 1994.
Technological advances over the last 40 years include DNA comparisons, which, if they turn up a match, "bring closure or some type of finality" for surviving family members who might have spent decades unsure of the fate of a missing young man, Dart said.
In 2011, those advances led to the identification of 19-year-old William George Bundy of Chicago as one of Gacy's victims. Last year, a DNA match identified 16-year-old James "Jimmie" Byron Haakenson of Minnesota.
"I felt confident, if the stars aligned, maybe we'd identify one victim. Now we've identified two," Dart said.
An unexpected result of the department's efforts under the leadership of sheriff's detective Sgt. Jason Moran has been solving 11 unrelated cold cases in jurisdictions around the country, he said.
Dart cites the case of 21-year-old Daniel Raymond Noe from Washington, Illinois, near Peoria, who had been working in Washington state and was hitchhiking back to Northwestern University in Evanston. He never made it, Dart said.
His family thought he might have been passing through northern Cook County where Gacy hunted victims, so they submitted DNA. Authorities matched his DNA to an unidentified hiker whose remains were found in 2010 on a steep slope on Mount Olympus in Utah, Dart said. Authorities speculated the avid climber stopped to hike, suffered an injury, died and remained there until other hikers discovered his remains.
That revelation brought relief to his family, which Dart said is another reason he encourages people to supply DNA. For more information, call the Cook County sheriff's office at (708) 865-6244 or see cookcountysheriff.org/unidentified-victims-john-wayne-gacy/.
The bodies of the six unidentified young men offered a few clues: height range, sometimes hair color, previous injuries, condition of teeth. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the sheriff's office this year released facial reconstruction images of two of the unidentified victims.
Even if it turns out your loved one wasn't a Gacy victim, Dart said, DNA might reveal the fate of a long-missing relative.
"We as a society should never stop caring about identifying victims and making sure families who have been victimized are made whole," he said.