A victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy has been identified nearly 45 years after his body was discovered due to genealogy information obtained via a family lineage search, WGN9 reported.
The victim was identified as North Carolina man Francis Wayne Alexander.
Alexander is estimated to have been 21 or 22 years old when Gacy murdered him between 1976 and 1977, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said during a press conference announcing the identification of Alexander’s remains, according to WGN9.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the remains were identified through a nonprofit group, the DNA Doe Project, which works with law enforcement in order to identify bodies through DNA.
Alexander disappeared between November 1976 and March 1977, and his body was unidentifiable when it was discovered in Gacy’s crawl space at the time, according to the Tribune.
His remains were among those of 29 people police found in Gacy’s crawl space outside Chicago, the Tribune reported.
Through genealogical research, a DNA profile was produced, which allowed the victim’s profile to be compared to others’ profiles on the genealogy website, according to the Tribune.
In conjunction with the genetic testing, financial records, post-mortem reports and other information, investigators were able to finally confirm that the remains belonged to Alexander, WGN9 stated.
According to WGN9, in 2011, Dart’s office was able to exhume the remains of eight victims, including Alexander, who had been buried without police being able to identify them.
The office asked anyone who had a male relative go missing in the 1970s — when Gacy was luring young men and boys to his home to kill — to submit DNA for testing, WGN9 reported.
The police were subsequently able to identify a few of the victims’ remains, according to WGN9.
Alexander’s sister, Carolyn Sanders, thanked the sheriff’s office for its work throughout the years and for giving the family some “closure,” WGN9 reported.
“It is hard, even 45 years later, to know the fate of our beloved Wayne,” Sanders wrote, according to WGN9. “He was killed at the hands of a vile and evil man. Our hearts are heavy, and our sympathies go out to the other victims’ families. … We can now lay to rest what happened and move forward by honoring Wayne.”
WGN9 said DNA submissions by people who suspected that Gacy had killed their loved ones helped police throughout the country solve at least 11 cold cases of homicides that were unrelated to Gacy, who was executed in 1994.