‘OUR BELOVED WAYNE’

Family of Newly Identified Gacy Victim Never Knew He Was Dead

“They just loved him, but they thought that he wanted nothing more to do with them.”

Another victim of prolific serial killer John Wayne Gacy has been identified, authorities said Monday. Francis Wayne Alexander was murdered by Gacy sometime between early 1976 and 1977, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told reporters at a news conference. Alexander would have been 21 or 22 years old at the time of his death. Hailing from North Carolina, the young man had moved to Chicago when he had a fatal run-in with the murderer, who was eventually convicted of killing 33 young men and boys in a spree that lasted throughout the 1970s.

Alexander’s remains were hauled out of the crawl space beneath Gacy’s suburban ranch house in 1978, along with the remains of 26 other victims. More than four decades later, Dart’s office identified Alexander after exhuming his body and partnering with the DNA Doe Project, which tracked down Alexander’s family. “It is hard, even 45 years later, to know the fate of our beloved Wayne,” Alexander’s sister said in a statement. Dart said that the victim’s family had not known he had been dead. “They just loved him, but they thought that he wanted nothing more to do with them,” Dart said, “so that’s why there was never a missing person’s report.”