Bones of 8 John Wayne Gacy victims secretly exhumed
BY FRANK MAIN fmain@suntimes.com October 12, 2011 8:08PM
The remains of 8 victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy (inset) were secretly exhumed by the Cook County Sheriff's Department last spring.
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Updated: January 23, 2012 3:59AM
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is trying to give names to the eight unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy — the notorious serial killer who murdered at least 33 young men in the 1970s.
Dart’s cold-case squad worked this year with the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification to obtain DNA from the jaw bones of four victims and the femurs of four others.
Gacy’s victims were white males in their mid-teens to early 20s. The 25 identified victims had all disappeared between 1972 and 1978.
The eight unidentified victims were buried in Chicago-area cemeteries with grave markers inscribed with “We Remembered” and the date they were interred.
“These were eight young men with futures,” Dart said Wednesday. “These are eight people who deserve more.”
Dart urged the public to contact his office with information involving any missing young men who fit the profile of the victims. The hotline number is (800) 942-1950.
The sheriff said he’s casting a nationwide dragnet because some of Gacy’s known victims came from Michigan, Tennessee, Iowa and Minnesota. They were abducted while they were in Chicago for various reasons, but Gacy’s credit card records show he had traveled in Colorado, Nevada and elsewhere at the time he was on his rampage, Dart said.
“A person who as sick and evil as this is not relegating his sickness and evilness to his backyard,” Dart said.
Gacy was executed in 1994. Investigators confirmed he had killed at least 33 victims — 29 of whom were buried in his crawlspace and in his yard in unincorporated Cook County.
Four other victims were found dumped in the Des Plaines River. Gacy said he disposed of a fifth victim in the river, but that body was never recovered.
The news of Dart’s push to identify Gacy’s unknown victims comes as the mother of one of the known victims, Michael Marino, won a court order last week to exhume the body of a Gacy victim identified in 1980 as her son.
In June, the sheriff’s office located the jaw bones of the eight unidentified Gacy victims. The bones had been buried separately from the rest of their bodies, Dart said. Useful DNA was extracted from only four of the jaw bones, he said.
In September, the sheriff’s office exhumed the bodies of the other four victims and submitted their femurs for testing. DNA was extracted from two of the victims and authorities expect to obtain DNA for the other two by the end of October.
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