New John Wayne Gacy victim identified 45 years later: Young man’s remains found under killer’s home

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Authorities have identified the remains of a young man who was killed by serial killer John Wayne Gacy in the late 1970s after they dug up his body along with the remains of seven other unidentified victims a decade ago.

Francis Wayne Alexander would have been 21 or 22 years old when Gacy killed him sometime between early 1976 and early 1977, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said at a news conference Monday afternoon.

Alexander, who shares a middle name with his killer, was originally from North Carolina and was briefly married in 1975. Deputies compared DNA from his remains to his mother and half-brother, who they found on a genealogy website.

Gacy murdered 33 young men and boys between 1972 and 1978 at his ranch house in the outskirts of Chicago. He often raped them and killed them by asphyxiation or strangulation. 

Authorities found 26 sets of remains under Gacy’s home in 1978. Eight unidentified bodies were exhumed for identification in 2011, and five remain unnamed. 

Alexander’s sister, Carolyn Sanders, thanked the sheriff’s office for giving the family some level of ‘closure.’

‘It is hard, even 45 years later, to know the fate of our beloved Wayne,’ Sanders wrote.

‘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.’

Alexander’s remains were among 26 sets that police found in the crawl space under Gacy’s home just outside the city in 1978.

Three victims, meanwhile, were found buried on Gacy’s property and four others whom Gacy admitted killing were found in waterways south of Chicago.

In 2011, Dart’s office exhumed the remains of eight victims, including Alexander, who had been buried without police knowing who they were. 

Sheriff Dart called on anyone who had a male relative disappear in the Chicago area in the 1970s to submit DNA. 

That was the time when Gacy was luring young men and boys to his home to eventually kill them.

Within weeks, the sheriff’s office announced that it had identified one set of remains as those of William Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.

In 2017, the office identified a second set as those of 16-year-old Jimmy Haakenson, who disappeared after he phoned his mother in Minnesota and told her that he was in Chicago.

‘One of the worst people in the world that walked the Earth murdered my brother,’ Jimmy’s sister Lorie Sisterman said at the time. 

‘You hope for something different,’ she said, adding, ‘I’m so glad to know where my brother is.’

The details of Alexander’s life in Chicago are sketchy. Born in North Carolina, he moved to New York and then on to Chicago, where he was married for approximately three months before he was divorced in 1975.

According to the sheriff’s office´s news release, the last known record of Alexander’s life was a traffic ticket he received in Chicago in January of 1976 – a year in which he earned little money. 

How he crossed paths with one of the most notorious serial killers in American history is a mystery, as authorities say all they know is that ‘Alexander lived in an area that was frequented by Gacy and where other identified victims had previously lived.’

Gacy – who became known as the ‘serial killer clown’ due to his penchant for dressing up as a circus entertainer – lured his young male victims to his home, before raping, torturing and strangling them. 

He performed at children’s hospitals and charitable events as Pogo the Clown or Patches the Clown.

The serial killer was born in Chicago and was married to Marlynn Myers, with whom he had two children, from 1964 to 1969. 

The couple moved to Iowa, where Gacy agreed to manage Myers’ father’s KFC franchises. 

Myers filed for divorce after Gacy was convicted to 10 years in prison for oral sodomy against a 15-year-old boy, though he only served 18 months of his sentence.

He established a contracting company called PDM Contractors in 1970. The business would later lead Gacy to his final victim, a 15-year-old employee at a pharmacy that PDM had remodeled. 

Gacy was married to Carole Hoff, whom he had dated in high school, from 1972 to 1976.

Gacy was politically active and was named the precinct captain for Norwood Park Township. 

He supervised Chicago’s annual Polish Constitution Day Parade starting in 1975. He met, and took a picture with, then-First Lady Rosalynn Carter through the job in 1978, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Gacy tortured and raped 26-year-old Jeffrey Rignall in 1978, but Rignall managed to get away.

Rignall vomited and was led away from the stand ‘in near hysterics’ while testifying at Gacy’s trial a couple years later, according to an Associated Press report published in the Gadsden Times in February 1980, which referred to Rignall as a ‘self avowed bisexual.’

‘I was hit in the face by a dish cloth or a rag … it had a cold feeling and I had a buzzing bee in my head and I went unconscious,’ Rignall said, adding that he’d needed daily psychiatric treatment since the incident.

He was orally and anally raped and left by a statue in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, Rignall recounted in his book 29 Below. 

The depravity of Gacy’s crimes shocked the nation, and he was executed at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois in 1994 after spending more than a decade on death row.

The identification of Alexander, the latest victim to be named, came together when the sheriff’s department teamed up with a nonprofit called the DNA Doe Project, which uses genetic information to locate relatives of dead people who have not been identified. 

The organization compared the DNA profile from the unidentified victim’s remains to profiles on a genealogy website to find potential relatives. That led it to Alexander’s family, and Alexander’s mother and half-brother provided their DNA for comparison.

Between the genetic testing, financial records, post-mortem reports and other information, investigators were able to confirm that the remains were Alexander’s.

The submission of DNA from people who suspected Gacy might have killed their loved ones has helped police solve at least 11 cold cases of homicides that had nothing to do with Gacy, who was executed in 1994. 

It has also helped families find loved ones who while missing, were alive, including a man in Oregon who had no idea his family was looking for him.