John Wayne Gacy Victims

Case background and investigation

Between 1972 and 1978, John Wayne Gacy, a building contractor and locally active community figure in the Chicago suburb of Norwood Park Township, Illinois, murdered at least 33 young men and boys. Gacy typically lured victims, many of them teenagers or young laborers, to his ranch-style home at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, where he assaulted and strangled them. His first known killing was that of 16-year-old Timothy McCoy in January 1972, and the pace of the murders increased in the mid- to late 1970s. Because of his public persona, including performing as a clown at children's parties and civic events, Gacy was later widely referred to in the press as the 'Killer Clown.'

Gacy concealed most of his victims on his own property. Investigators ultimately recovered 26 bodies buried in the crawl space beneath his house and three more elsewhere on the grounds; four additional victims were disposed of in the Des Plaines River after the crawl space ran out of room. The scale of the concealment was not discovered until authorities began investigating the December 1978 disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Piest, a pharmacy employee last seen leaving to meet Gacy about a job. Surveillance and a search warrant led police to the Summerdale Avenue address.

Gacy was arrested on December 21, 1978, and confessed the following day as human remains were unearthed from beneath his home. He was charged with 33 murders. His trial in Cook County began in February 1980; jurors rejected an insanity defense, and on March 13, 1980, Gacy was convicted and sentenced to death. After more than a decade of appeals, he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. His conviction and execution are matters of established public record.

Although Gacy himself was brought to justice, not all of his victims were identified at the time. Several sets of remains were buried as unidentified for decades. In 2011, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart reopened the identification effort, exhuming unidentified remains and seeking DNA samples from families of young men who had gone missing across the United States in the 1970s. Within weeks the office identified William Bundy, a 19-year-old who had disappeared in 1976. In 2017, investigators identified 16-year-old James 'Jimmy' Haakenson of Minnesota, and in October 2021 they identified Francis Wayne Alexander using forensic genealogy in collaboration with the DNA Doe Project.

As of the mid-2020s, the Cook County Sheriff's Office reports that five of Gacy's victims remain unidentified. Investigators continue to solicit DNA samples via buccal (cheek) swabs from living relatives of males who went missing in the United States between roughly 1970 and 1979, comparing those profiles against the recovered remains and, where feasible, applying investigative genetic genealogy. The Sheriff's office frames the ongoing initiative as an effort to give the remaining victims their names back and to bring answers to families of the missing.