A man from North Carolina who disappeared in the 1970s has been identified as one of the dozens of victims murdered by serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
Francis Wayne Alexander’s remains were among those found in the crawl space of John Wayne Gacy’s Chicago home in 1978.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart had ordered eight unidentified victims’ bodies to be exhumed in 2011 in an effort to identify them through the use of DNA testing.
Alexander is the third victim of John Wayne Gacy to be identified in the last decade. According to the Sheriff’s office, he would have been 21 or 22 when Gacy killed him between 1976 and 1977.
John Wayne Gacy was convicted of killing 33 young men between 1972 and 1978 and burying them on his property. He was executed in 1994.
He often lured young men to his house for sex by pretending to be a police officer or promising them construction work.
In reopening the investigation, Sheriff Dart had asked families of young men who had disappeared between 1970 and 1978 to submit saliva samples to compare DNA with the eight victims who were buried without being identified.
Months later, William George Bundy (a 19-year-old construction worker) was identified as a Gacy victim and in 2017, James Byron Haakenson (a missing teenager) was identified as another victim.
Authorities have said that they are unsure how Alexander crossed paths with Gacy, in January 1976 he received a traffic ticket in Chicago and that was the last record of him being alive.
Mr. Alexander “lived in an area that was frequented by Gacy and where other identified victims had previously lived”, the sheriff’s office said.
Police say their efforts to identify the other remains are ongoing.
Sources: BBC, Yahoo
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