After decades of being known only as an unfortunate soul who died at the hands of a serial killer clown, John Wayne Gacy’s “Victim #5” has now been identified.
Forty-four years later, closure was finally found for the family who’d assumed their son had disappeared on purpose — they never considered that he could have been dead this whole time.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Office finally identified the remains of the nameless victim as Francis Wayne Alexander on Monday. After a collaboration with the DNA Doe Project (an organization dedicated to identifying remains using genetic genealogy), they were able to compare the remains to a genetic profile that led them to believe it was Alexander.
The Sheriff’s office discovered that his mother was still alive, so they reached out to her for a DNA sample. She happily obliged, along with one of Alexander’s half-brother’s which both returned a supremely positive match.
Cook County Sheriff identifies Francis Wayne Alexander as previously unidentified victim of serial killer John Gacy. pic.twitter.com/1xacu0zroY
— Phil Rogers (@nbcphilrogers) October 25, 2021
The family issued a statement, even though the news is surprisingly jarring given that they were in the dark about Alexander’s whereabouts.
“It is hard, even 45 years later, to know the fate of our beloved Wayne. 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. Our only comfort is knowing this killer no longer breathes the same air as we do. We can now lay to rest what happened and move forward by honoring Wayne.”
They’d never gone looking for Alexander, nor did they file a missing person report. Sheriff Tom Dart said that the family loved Alexander but told investigators that he “had made decisions in his life” that led them to believe that “he just wanted to be left alone.” So they let him be.
Alexander was one of John Wayne Gacy’s 33 victims. Authorities have narrowed down his time of death to some time in early 1976-1977.
The last “proof of life” was a traffic ticket on January 5, 1976. Alexander was found buried underneath another victim who is known to have died on March 15, 1977. Alexander would have been 21 or 22 at the time.
Gacy was arrested in December of 1978 for the murders and rapes of 33 men and boys in the Chicago area. He disposed of their bodies by hiding them in the crawl space underneath his house, among other places.
Gacy went to trial and was convicted in February 1980 after less than two hours of jury deliberations, becoming one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. He was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.
Since the reopening of the case in 2011, three more Gacy victims were identified (including Alexander), and five more have yet to be named.
Sheriff Dart is not giving up.
“We have five remaining victims. We are going to continue pressing ahead with that, we’re going to utilize all these different tools that we have utilized on this.”
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