John Wayne Gacy was executed in 1994 for the murders of 33 young men and boys, but he hasn’t gone away. Gacy made headlines 17 months ago when DNA testing led to the identification of one of his eight victims who’d remained nameless. He made more headlines last year when Tom Dart, sheriff of Cook County, added Gacy’s DNA to a national database to see if it might link him to other murders. There may be victims we know nothing about, Dart reasoned.
True’s site describes how Dorsch lived near the apartment building and spotted Gacy out on the grounds late one night, shovel in hand. It introduces witnesses Dorsch rounded up who support his theory—such as Mike Nelson, who as a teenager in the mid-70s lived across the street, who used to give Gacy a hand keeping up the property, and who recalls a couple of long “trenches” three to four feet deep that mysteriously appeared in the property’s triangular front yard. Nelson recollects that a few weeks later the trenches disappeared overnight; they’d been filled in and bushes planted. When Chicago police, at Dorsch’s urging, did some digging in the yard in 1998, Nelson says they dug exactly where he’d told them not to look. True reports that Dorsch considers the 1998 search a joke and anticipated Dart’s search being no better.
And on March 26 Sneed had another scoop. “It’s over,” she wrote. “There was no Geraldo moment. The search for victims of mass murderer John Wayne Gacy in the Northwest Side apartment building where Gacy’s mother once lived turned up squat … nothing.”
Said Sullivan: “Simply put, he wasn’t charged because we didn’t have the evidence to charge him.”
According to Bilecki, Dart’s search was thorough, professional, and lasted more than five hours. Infrared Diagnostics, a Saint Louis firm that frequently works with the FBI, was there with its ground-penetrating radar, and the FBI had a team of springer spaniels supposedly capable of detecting traces of bodies buried for 150 years.
“Zero! Zero embarrassment for that!” Bilecki insisted. “For people to believe that or say that is completely inaccurate. That property needed to be searched properly, and it was.”
