In 2011, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart reopened the Gacy investigation with a specific mission: to use modern DNA technology to identify the remaining nameless victims. The sheriff’s office called upon anyone who had lost a male relative under suspicious circumstances in the Chicago area between 1970 and 1979 to submit DNA swabs.
He’d been floating through Chicago’s northwest side for three years, crashing on couches, turning tricks when he had to, and dreaming of California—some place where the winter didn’t bite through your bones and people didn’t look through you like you were a ghost.
John Wayne Gacy was born on March 17, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois. Growing up, Gacy was a shy and awkward child who struggled to connect with his peers. His parents, Charles and Mary Gacy, were both of Polish descent and instilled in their son a strong Catholic upbringing. Despite his difficulties, Gacy's early life seemed relatively normal, with no indication of the horrors that would later define his existence.
The story of Bobby Walker and John Wayne Gacy serves as a stark reminder that the line between good and evil is often blurred, and that even the most unlikely of friendships can have far-reaching and devastating consequences.
However, the DNA drive did more than just identify Gacy's victims. It also inadvertently solved several unrelated cold cases from the 1970s. By gathering DNA from families of missing young men from that era, police were able to match missing persons reports to unrelated John Does found in other states, providing closure to families who had spent forty years wrongly believing their sons might have been buried under Gacy's crawl space. The Legacy of the Gacy Victims