Following John Wayne Gacy’s arrest and confession in December 1978, investigators started excavating a 28-by-38-foot crawl area contained in the Killer Clown’s Norwood Park Township residence, revealing 26 our bodies buried in shallow graves.
Every physique was assigned an figuring out quantity, and the realm was sectioned off to make sure a scientific restoration.
The victims have been predominantly younger males, lots of whom had been reported lacking within the Chicago space.
Along with the our bodies discovered within the crawl area, three extra have been found elsewhere on Gacy’s property, and 4 others have been recovered from the Des Plaines River, bringing the overall variety of recognized victims to 33.
The preliminary identification efforts have been hindered by the technological limitations of the time.
Within the early 2000s, with developments in DNA evaluation, the Cook dinner County Sheriff’s Workplace, in collaboration with forensic specialists, started re-examining the circumstances.
This renewed effort led to the identification of three victims: William Bundy, recognized in November 2011 by DNA testing; James Haakenson, recognized in July 2017 utilizing DNA evaluation; and Francis Wayne Alexander, recognized in October 2021 by forensic family tree.
Regardless of these efforts, 5 victims—#10, #13, #21, #26, and #28—stay unidentified.
The Cook dinner County Sheriff’s Workplace continues to hunt data to establish these people and encourages anybody with details about lacking males between 1970 and 1979 to contact them.
John Wayne Gacy was sentenced to loss of life on March 13, 1980.
Though his execution was initially scheduled for June 2, 1980, numerous appeals and authorized challenges prolonged the method for practically 14 years.
On Might 10, 1994, the notorious “Killer Clown” was executed by deadly injection at Stateville Correctional Middle in Illinois.
