Bones of 8 John Wayne Gacy victims secretly exhumed
BY FRANK MAIN Staff Reporter fmain@suntimes.com October 12, 2011 8:54AM
This undated photo provided by the Cook County Sheriff's Department shows buckets containing jaw bones and teeth of victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy that were exhumed by authorities. The Cook County Sheriff's Department last spring secretly exhumed the bones of the 8 victims who were never identified in the hopes that scientific tests that were not around between 1972 and 1978 when Gacy killed his 33 victims will make identification possible. (AP Photo/Cook County Sheriff's Department)
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Updated: November 16, 2011 1:58PM
For more than 30 years, eight of serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s 33 victims have remained unidentified.
But earlier this year, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart quietly obtained a court order to exhume their bodies for DNA.
Now he’s asking for the public’s help in learning the victims’ names.
At a news conference Wednesday, Dart urged anyone who believes he or she is related to the unidentified victims to call a sheriff’s hotline at (800) 942-1950. DNA tests can confirm whether they’re related.
“These were eight young men with futures,” Dart said. “These are eight people who deserve more.”
Dart said the DNA project began earlier this year as part of a push to solve dozens of unsolved cold cases. His investigators worked with the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification to obtain DNA from the bones of Gacy’s eight unknown victims. DNA was extracted from the jaw bones of four unidentified victims and the femurs of two others. Officials expect to gather DNA from the other two victims by the end of October.
The eight unidentified victims had been buried in Chicago-area cemeteries with grave markers inscribed with “We Remembered” and the date they were interred. They were among 29 young men whose bodies were found on Gacy’s property in unincorporated Norwood Park in 1978. Four other Gacy victims were found in the Des Plaines River. Gacy told police he dumped a fifth victim in the river, but that body was never recovered. Gacy was executed in 1994.
Gacy’s victims were white males ranging in age from mid-teens to early 20s. The identified victims all disappeared between 1972 and 1978. One of those victims was identified as Michael Marino, but his mother said she has harbored doubts that the body she buried in a west suburban cemetery was really her son.
Earlier this year, she hired an attorney, Robert Stephenson, to investigate. Michael’s autopsy appeared to contradict dental records created when he was alive, Stephenson found. And last week, a Cook County judge granted Marino permission to exhume the body for testing.
Stephenson said he plans to meet as early as Thursday with Dr. Edward Pavlik, the forensic odontologist who originally helped identify Gacy’s victims through their dental records. “If he has compelling information that this is truly Michael, then we would stop the exhumation,” Stephenson said.
Gacy, a part-time clown, lured his victims with promises of construction jobs or drugs and alcohol; posing as a police officer; or offering money for sex. Some of the victims’ relatives may have been reluctant to come forward because they were embarrassed about the lifestyles of their missing loved ones, Dart said.
Dart said he hopes parents, siblings and cousins of missing young men who fit the profile of Gacy’s victims will no longer hesitate to contact sheriff’s officials.
The University of North Texas has agreed to do the DNA testing for free, Dart said. The cemeteries where the unidentified victims were buried didn’t charge for the exhumations, he added.
The sheriff said he’s casting a nationwide dragnet for relatives of the unidentified victims because some of Gacy’s known victims came from Michigan, Tennessee, Iowa and Minnesota. They were abducted in Chicago, but Gacy’s credit card records show he traveled in Colorado, Nevada and elsewhere at the time of his rampage, Dart said.
“A person as sick and evil as this is not relegating his sickness and evilness to his backyard,” Dart said.
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