I have a lot of things that I’ve forgotten,
that I can’t remember.
For instance, I can go back to my childhood and stuff,
and I still remember that, but yet, I can go into the ’70s,
and there are a lot of things I can’t remember.
The same thing with the victims: I’ve looked at all of ...
I don’t know if you notice here.
We’ve got pictures of every one of the victims here,
and believe it or not, for the last 12 years,
I’ve studied these photos of these victims,
and there is no ...
We have a shot of all of the victims together here,
and when you look over at the photos,
I have no recollection of any of them, never met them.
And we’ve gone over this more than once.
It’s just names and faces, and when you look at them ...
The thing of it is, we took it a step further.
We went into their backgrounds.
I wanted to know where they were at,
what schools they attended, who they hung out with
and what kind of activities they were into,
and that’s what we dug up on each one of the victims,
but still, there is no association.
None of them never worked for me. None of them ...
They never went to any places that I ever hung around
because I didn’t hang around that many places.
Unless you were involved in politics
or if you were involved in clowning,
then I might have ran into you.
But there’s no way I could’ve run into any of them.
I was reviewing the interview last night,
and having listened to those lies for so many years,
it’s like ... I found I wasn’t really listening.
I was watching the other tells: the eye motions,
the hand motions, the hands on the book.
They’ve got all that jewelry
that doesn’t belong to the victim.
They’ve got the two clown suits that don’t belong to the victim.
John researched all of his victims.
He would put together background information.
He had chapters, 20, 30 pages on victims,
and a lot of it was clearly made up or hearsay,
but he felt it was something that made a case for him,
that, "Well, yeah,
maybe I killed them, but maybe they deserved it."
Just like I consider myself the 34th victim,
I consider the families victims, as well,
because they did not get justice
from the shoddy investigation all the way down through ...
It wasn’t until just
recently that in going through my archives,
I found some tapes that John had given me in March of ’94
before his execution.
He didn’t want the guards cleaning out his cell,
so one day, I went out of there with tapes and books,
and I just stuffed them in a box,
so they sat in that box until about a year ago,
and I’m going,
"Oh, those tapes aren’t with all the other tapes."
So we listened to them.
What’d you do with them?
Threw them downstairs in the basement.
Just threw them down there?
Just threw them down in the crawl space.
It’s Gacy confessing and mostly saying, "Yeah.
I did that. I don’t know why."
All the ones you remember seem to be is house itself.
Yeah.
There is this other person, who I think is his lawyer.
Those last few were killed in the house.
All the ones you remember
were found dead or killed in the house.
Or the garage, yeah. Killed in the garage?
Yeah.
Why were the last few dumped in a river,
as opposed to being buried?
I don’t know. It was easier.
This is probably in early ’79 while he was still nervous.
You can hear that in his voice. He’s not in control. He’s upset.
I think I killed him, but I don’t know.
What do you mean, you think you killed him?
Well, he was dead.
I don’t quite understand why he gave them to me,
but these tapes, he knew what was on them.
He had to have.
There is one guy I remember taking out of the house
and throwing him in the forest preserve.
That was 2 years ago.
Took him out of the house? Yeah.
Then put him in the woods.
Why the hell is that hitting me now?
Bury him in the woods? No, I didn’t bury him.
Just laid him in the woods.
I just took him out in the woods and ...
What woods?
Over by Maine Township High School.
You took him out of your house, though?
Yeah. He was in my house.
He was convicted of 33 murders,
but there were many missing persons or murders
that happened during John’s active period
that could have been his work.
There’s no reason to think that John only killed 33 victims.
He had a pattern. He had a success rate,
and he was prolific in everything he did.
When investigators began taking bodies
out of the crawl space
under John Wayne Gacy’s Norwood Park home,
they were never able to identify eight of them.
Now, Cook County sheriff Tom Dart
is hoping to offer their families some closure
by asking them to come forward with a DNA sample
that can be matched to newly extracted DNA.
We haven’t forgotten.
Reopening the case was really a strange sort of story.
When I first got in office,
I was wanting to do things differently.
With all the advances that we’ve had in our ...
not just on the criminal side of things,
but just technology and particularly DNA ...
I felt that cold cases should be reexamined.
At the time, we had a detective that was working with us named
Jason Moran, and he came to me, and he said,
"Well, what about us working on the Gacy case first?"
And I go, "Listen, there’s nothing cold about this case.
Gacy was caught, convicted, executed.
What are you talking about?"
The sheriff and I, we were in the process
of sort of organizing things and getting our cases together,
and I came across the cabinet.
It said 1978, Gacy, and just out of curiosity,
I opened it up, and by doing that, I learned
that eight of Gacy’s 33 victims were never identified.
Friends and relatives of missing teenage boys
have been calling from all over the country
to learn more about this bizarre crime.
We were under the impression that the Gacy case
was cleared and closed.
The offender was known, was found guilty,
and the victims had been identified, cleared and closed,
but it wasn’t, and it wasn’t for lack of trying.
My predecessors did what they could to identify
every last victim.
Doctors and dentists matched bones and teeth
against medical records and X-rays.
The bodies found under John Gacy’s house
were simply too decomposed
to allow any other means of identification.
But in the end, there was eight
that were never identified, eight forgotten people,
so I took that information to the sheriff.
Back in the ’70s, everything was dental records.
That was the only way you could identify people.
Jason was adamant that based on new technologies and DNA
that we could make some headway.
The point of any cold case is to bring contemporary
investigative methods to an old investigation.
We knew that in this case, DNA would be helpful.
To start, we needed a biological sample from each victim
so we could test it in a lab
and see if we could get suitable DNA profiles,
so the first thing we had to do was go to the bodies.
In June, the sheriff’s office exhumed the jawbones
of eight unnamed victims buried at a Homewood cemetery.
They were originally saved to compare to dental records
but contained enough DNA for four complete profiles.
In September,
bodies were exhumed from four Chicago-area cemeteries,
and samples were sent to labs of the University of North Texas,
where additional DNA profiles were extracted.
That process got us to where we had, on most of the victims,
very good profiles. They were all suitable
for comparison to family members of missing persons,
and that was really
when we launched the investigation to the public.
Cook County sheriff Tom Dart is calling on families
who think a loved one may have been a victim of
John Wayne Gacy to come forward and offer up a DNA sample.
In particular, the sheriff’s department
is looking for victims of relatives of victims
who disappeared between 1970 and December 22nd, 1978.
Well, right away, the phones and the e-mails
started flowing in, people from all over the country
looking for their missing loved one.
It was overwhelming.
Within a day, we had 70, 80 leads.
I never thought it was going to be easy.
What I did think, though,
it was going to be relatively straightforward
in running it out. For the life of me,
I had no idea what direction it would take,
and I had no idea on how far it would go.
One of the first leads to come in was a lead
representing a missing boy named William Bundy.
It was actually two leads that came in.
One was from his sister, Laura.
I remember leaving that one night,
saying he was going to go to a party,
and that was the last time I saw him.
His sister basically explains that in about 1976,
her brother got dressed to go to a party, left the house,
and he was never seen or heard from again.
They filled out a missing-persons report
with the Chicago Police Department.
Chicago Police Department couldn’t find him,
and a couple years later, the Gacy case broke,
and they immediately said, "Maybe this is Bill."
They went to my predecessors, who said,
"Well, do you have dental records?
We need dental records to compare to these bodies,"
so they went to their dentist, but he said,
"I destroyed all my records when I retired.
I don’t have any dental records for Bill."
At that time, there was really no other way
to identify a markedly decomposed or skeletal remains
other than dental records, so that was it.
There was nothing more they could do.
Another lead was from his friend from growing up.
Bill’s friend told me that the last time he saw Bill alive,
Bill had came up,
and he had a big wad of money in his pocket,
maybe a couple hundred bucks, and in the ’70s for a young guy,
a couple hundred bucks was a lot of money.
So he said, "Where’d you get that money from?
You selling drugs?"
He goes, "No, I’m working construction for a guy,"
and he found that to be curious because Bill was small statured.
He wasn’t one of these
sort of larger construction-worker types.
So right away, I’m prioritizing it.
Does this fit what I know about the Gacy case?
And it absolutely did.
Here is a young man the right age.
He was 17, 18 years old. Right time period, 1976, 1977.
He’s in Chicago, and his friends say he works construction,
so I decided to pursue that one right away,
so I met with Laura, and I met with Laura’s other brother,
who was still living,
and I collected their DNA sample.
And Murphy’s Law, victim number 19,
no matter what we did,
we could not get a good, a perfect DNA profile.
We only had a partial profile. It wasn’t enough,
but the one thing that I learned through investigation
is that victim number 19,
when you look at their dental analysis,
the upper canine teeth, the eye teeth were missing.
They weren’t missing as a result of postmortem tooth loss.
In other words, they didn’t fall out of the decomposing body.
They were removed by a dentist prior to the death,
and the sockets had healed,
so I knew if I could get a picture of Bill smiling
and I could see that the upper row of teeth
were missing the eye teeth, that would be a fantastic clue.
So I asked her, "Do you have a picture of Bill smiling?"
She says, "Not really." She goes,
"My mother was so distraught after he went missing,
and after years, she started getting rid of his stuff
because it was too hard to look at."
I go, "Well, do you have anything?"
She goes, "Well, I have his wallet. I have an ID.
I have this. I have" ... She goes, "Oh!"
She goes, "I have his teeth." I got, "What do you mean?"
She goes, "Well, he went to the dentist about a year
before he went missing,
and the dentist removed some teeth from his upper jaw."
She goes, "I don’t know what it was.
It was just two teeth, and he asked
if he could have them and put them in a little jar."
You could picture a teenage boy wanting to go gross
out his friends with his extracted teeth,
so she brought the teeth down, and they were eye teeth.
So the mitochondrial DNA,
along with the case facts and circumstances
and the absence of those teeth
is what identified victim number 19.
In Chicago’s own Gothic horror story,
the first break in more than 30 years.
Because of all of this work, victim number 19
is never going to be known by a number anymore.
Through DNA analysis, investigators say they now know
that victim number 19 was William George Bundy.
Bundy was buried as an unidentified Gacy victim
here at Resurrection Cemetery in 1981.
Laura O’Leary was Bundy’s sister.
I know that the sorrow will eventually go away,
and I’ll have a place to visit him.
When do you stop trying to find a missing person?
When do you stop caring?
What is the cutoff when law enforcement and society
stop caring about an unidentified dead person,
about a murder victim and about their families?
And that’s really our overall philosophy on cold cases.
We should never stop caring.
We should never stop pursuing these cases.
As I told you, when the FBI first came in to check on me,
you said that you were kept out of the case back in ’78,
and that was only because of egos.
They did not want a professional coming in
and doing an investigation,
so they did their sloppy investigation
and let it slide that way.
You see, everybody was so excited about the large,
massive case, and everybody was looking with their egos
as to how they could close this thing up,
and you’re not the only one that really have hurt.
You’ve had the victims’ family vent
all their hostility towards me,
and they think I’m the monster that killed their son
or took out their son and stuff like that, when in fact,
most of them don’t even have the remains of their own sons.
This story, just like so many other things,
it still has people coming up with conspiracy theories.
It still comes up with people claiming that
the person identified has been misidentified,
but some of it might be true, and we have to follow it up.
Could there have been any misidentification? Sure.
The means of identification have changed so much.
Forensic dentistry is not today’s DNA.
We didn’t have that back then,
so if there is a misidentification,
I would be glad to have it corrected.
I began to be involved in the Gacy case in May of 2011.
Mrs. Sherry Marino came to my office
for the purpose of having me look
into whether her son, Michael Marino,
the youngest alleged victim of John Wayne Gacy,
had been misidentified many years prior.
Sherry Marino had, I guess you call it,
a mother’s hunch that the body in her son’s grave was not him.
The third time when I went to the cemetery,
I put my hand on the grave, and it felt cold.
It felt ... It didn’t feel right.
Michael Marino was 14 years old when he went missing
on October 24th, 1976.
Michael was going to go to a game room to meet his friend.
Mrs. Marino recalls that he gave her a kiss on her cheek
and said, "Mom, I’ll be back for the movie,"
and then that was the last time that she ever saw him.
I just couldn’t believe it when he didn’t come home.
She called the police to make a missing persons report.
The police basically told her,
as unfortunately they did many of the Gacy victims,
that her son was likely a runaway.
Mrs. Marino knew that Michael would not run away
because he was a very dutiful son
and loved his mother very much.
She didn’t see any reason that he should’ve disappeared,
so she continued to go to the Chicago Police Department,
so much so that I guess they were sort of getting
a little bit tired of her coming there all the time,
and the youth officer that was responsible for the son
was telling her, "Oh, Mrs. Marino,
I saw your son on the street the other day.
He ran away from me, and I can’t catch him.
I’m not going to chase him. He’ll come home when he wants."
So this went on for about 2 years
where she continued to go to Chicago police inquiring about,
"any progress on my son?"
They repeatedly told Mrs. Marino
that Michael was a runaway.
Because of the kind of treatment that she received
from the Chicago Police Department at the time,
she spent thousands of dollars of her own money
hiring investigators
and actually putting herself at physical safety risk
to try to find Michael.
She went in drug houses and other very dangerous places
to try to see if she could get any information on her son.
In 1978, John Wayne Gacy was arrested.
After the bodies started to be discovered in the crawl space,
the Chicago Police Department made a general call
to the public to provide dental records from their sons.
They are telling them to send dental records and charts
because that’s the only way the bodies can be identified.
So Mrs. Marino did provide Michael’s dental records
to the Chicago Police Department,
and in early 1979, she was informed
that her son was not a John Wayne Gacy victim,
so she then continued to look for Michael
because Michael was missing.
Even at the time of the trial,
her son was not identified as being a victim,
and she went to them and said, "Is he a victim?"
They said, "Mrs. Marino,
we’re positive your son is not a victim."
And then in March of 1980, Mrs. Marino had a fateful day
in which two detectives knocked on her door,
and they said, "Mrs. Marino, we’re very sorry.
We made a huge mistake about telling you
that your son was a runaway,
and he has just been identified as a victim of John Wayne Gacy."
They did take her to a police precinct
to look at certain items
that they had recovered from John Wayne Gacy,
and Mrs. Marino said that she was not able to identify
any items that would’ve matched Michael’s.
So she went to see Dr. Stein at the morgue, and she inquired,
"How is it that she was only identified now
and not earlier when you’ve had all this information,
the dental records for all this time?"
And she said at first he was kind of cordial
and nice with her,
but it sort of ended on a bad note
where he basically told her, "Mrs. Marino,
just be thankful you got a body, and be done with it."
Does that mean it wasn’t him? We don’t know.
But she becomes convinced that he was misidentified.
Mrs. Marino buried a body in a grave
and has gone to that cemetery for,
oh, we’re talking 30-some years now
and wondered in her own heart
as she stood there whether this body and this grave is her son’s
because of the way everything went down.
Now, later in 2011, Mrs. Marino came to me
as a result of seeing the news interviews
about the 1998 dig on Miami Avenue,
and she told me she had a great suspicion
may not really be one of Gacy’s victims.
I told her ... I says, "Mrs. Marino,
I don’t know if your son is or isn’t a victim,
but I can tell you how we can get the answers to that."
Dorsch took her to the office of the medical examiner,
Nancy Jones,
and helped her file a request for the autopsy results
of the person she’d been told was her son.
A little while later, Dorsch called Jones
and asked how that search was coming.
Nancy Jones told Mr. Dorsch
that they would not be able to get the autopsy reports,
and so that was why he brought Mrs. Marino to my office
because I do a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests.
I didn’t know what we would find in the autopsy report.
It could’ve simply been that I would be able to let her know
that this was her son
and that she would find some closure from that.
Once I obtained the autopsy report,
however, I found discrepancies. It particularly mentioned
that there was no antemortem tooth loss,
basically that there was no tooth loss prior to death,
and yet when I reviewed
Michael’s personal dental charts,
the tooth number 15 was in fact listed as being missing.
In addition, there was a possible broken collarbone
for the decedent.
Mrs. Marino said that Michael did not ever have
a broken collarbone to her knowledge,
and thirdly, the autopsy report also mentioned the fact
that there was possible Native American heritage.
Again, I checked with Mrs. Marino.
Michael was of pure Italian ancestry.
Also, originally Mrs. Marino was told
that Michael was not a Gacy victim in early 1979.
Then in March of 1980, she was all of a sudden told
that Michael was, in fact, a Gacy victim.
Why did it take that long? What changed in the meantime?
We actually have no idea. In September of 2011,
I decided to file what’s called a petition for exhumation.
The judge held a hearing in October of 2011
and granted the petition.
Shortly after this comes word through the media
that Tom Dart, the sheriff of Cook County,
has decided to reopen the Gacy case.
No mention of Mrs. Marino.
We believe with the type ...
I thought it was a little bit suspect
because it followed within less than a week of our announcement
that we would be exhuming body number 14.
Long prior, of course, Mrs. Marino,
along with former detective Dorsch,
had already visited Nancy Jones, the medical examiner,
so ostensibly, the sheriff’s office would’ve been well aware
of the fact that we were looking into this case.
We’re sitting on things that we believe
can help bring closure to that.
To me, that would be somewhat immoral for me not to do that.
My immediate thought was, this was a way for him
to try to take away the steam from the exhumation
and tried to give a positive spin to the sheriff’s office
with respect to the John Wayne Gacy case.
We conducted the exhumation in September of 2012
at the Queen of Heaven Catholic cemetery in Hillside.
According to the judge’s order,
the Cook County medical examiner’s office
was able to be present to take DNA samples.
However, no one from the sheriff’s department
or the medical examiner attended the exhumation.
The body was brought to an area at the cemetery,
a warehouse where they were able to then lower the coffin.
The pathologist arrived. The coffin was then opened.
The first thing with as looking for was the jaws to see
if this tooth was actually there or not, tooth number 15,
that was so critical apparently
to the original identification of Michael Marino
as being body number 14 because the principal basis
on which the exhumation petition granted
was that the teeth did not match,
so I was looking for the maxilla,
which is the upper part of the jaw that goes along here,
and the mandible, which is the lower part of the jaw.
They were both completely missing.
That’s another thing everybody misses from this,
is that the victims’ families are not aware that ...
In a lot of the cases,
they don’t even have the remains of their own sons
because Dr. Stein never turned over the whole body,
and they took the heads off of each one of the victims,
so when you turn over the remains
to the loved one’s family, they don’t have the whole body.
So basically, there was only half of the skull in the coffin.
I was very concerned about what had happened with that,
and, of course, we found out later
that the medical examiner’s office
took the jaws off all of the skulls
for the Gacy victims at the time.
The upper and lower jawbones
from all of the unidentified victims
were retained by the medical examiner’s office
after the bodies had been buried
because the main way to identify skeletal remains
at that time was through dental identification,
and they kept them at the ME’s office for years
and years and years, hoping that a family member
of a missing person would come in and say,
"This is my missing loved one’s dental records.
Could you compare them?"
They were removed from the medical examiner’s office
in 2009
and then buried in the Homewood Memorial Gardens,
but at the time of the exhumation,
the pathologist took certain samples.
Apparently there was part of the mandible
that was still connected to the upper part of the skull
that he was able to extract in order to do DNA.
These samples were submitted to an independent laboratory,
very well-respected, called Labcorp.
We had received the report back on October 24th of 2012,
exactly 36 years to the day that Michael Marino went missing.
They were able to obtain a profile from the mandible.
It said that there was not a match
between Mrs. Marino and body number 14.
It was no shock. I always knew it.
It’s just a feeling that you get when you’re a mother.
We notified the sheriff’s department
so they would be aware of it, and then we went to the media.
Mrs. Marino wanted the world to know
that her son was not a victim
and that she had been right all the way along.
Mrs. Marino hired some attorneys to look at this.
We let them know, anything we can do to help,
but there was this somewhat adversarial relationship
I never understood,
and then once they did their own analysis,
we kept asking them to send us it,
and we had a hard time getting it,
and then once we got it, I’ll never forget,
it was all redacted. And it was like,
"Guys, if there’s something here, we want" ...
People make mistakes. If there was a mistake made,
if you have something, we would love to run it out.
Certain information was redacted from the information
we gave to the sheriff’s department.
This included personal information on Mrs. Marino
as well as Mrs. Marino’s full DNA profile
because Mrs. Marino did not trust the sheriff’s department,
based on prior conduct she had had with the authorities.
According to my viewpoint,
there’s nothing in the redactions
that we gave the sheriff that would inhibit them
from determining whether this was a misidentification or not.
Eventually, we had a meeting with Detective Moran
from the sheriff’s department.
We provided the notes from the exhumation.
We provided certain photographs, as well as the DNA results,
but Detective Moran was basically claiming
that we could not have gotten our sample from the mandible
because the jaws had already been removed.
Because no one from the sheriff’s department
or the medical examiner attended the exhumation of body 14,
they would have no idea that the pathologist,
in fact, did discover a portion of the mandible
that was still attached to the skull,
so they expressed their sorry to Mrs. Marino regarding her loss,
but they refused to acknowledge
the DNA results with respect to her son.
We have said from day one that our heart
bleeds for his mother. Our heart bleeds for her.
We’ve never once said, "Listen, everything was perfect."
No. There was no DNA. There was no nothing back then,
so could mistakes have been made?
Possibly, sure,
and that’s no shame on this person, that person.
The only shame would be is if you dig your heels in and say,
"Listen, we’re not reviewing it, and we’re perfect." No.
After the results came back, I made an offer.
We would be happy to provide Mrs. Marino’s DNA,
and we will have it retested with an independent lab
with the bone samples that we had collected,
and the sheriff’s office absolutely refused.
The sheriff’s department said,
"Let us do our own DNA test,"
but because Sherry Marino felt that authorities
had never treated her well and somewhat bullied her,
she didn’t trust them
and would not allow them to do their own DNA test,
so they were at a bit of a stalemate.
Why on Earth would Sherry Marino and her lawyer
and the scientists they hired conspire
to produce a result that’s not legitimate?
So the question really has to go back to the sheriff.
Why wouldn’t he want to work with that result?
When we were re-examining it ...
because we really wanted to help this mother out.
We wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything here ...
the odontologist, I think it is, who was there for the trial,
who did all the dental work, he still helps us on cases.
He had the dental records from the body
that had been recovered from the crawl space,
and I remember him holding it up like this,
and they were the same, and he was like, "I don’t ...
This is identical. I did not make a mistake here."
We’re continuing to waste manpower and economics
on an issue that is long gone. It is ...
Unfortunately, these two things,
the body and Marino are one and the same,
and I feel bad for Mrs. Marino that we keep stirring this pot.
In that time, the principal means of identification
was dental records.
That is entirely different now when we have DNA.
I find it somewhat ironic that the sheriff’s office
is utilizing the jaws and the teeth to conduct
their forensic investigation into unidentified Gacy victims
but refuses to acknowledge our DNA results.
Our door will always be open. They could call anytime.
We all have undying sympathy for Mrs. Marino.
Until we have reports and expert notes and reports,
there’s really not much we can do.
Sherry Marino has hard evidence
that her son was misidentified.
That’s an unidentified victim, and for some reason,
the sheriff isn’t interested
in adding those remains to his list.
This is completely inconsistent,
and I think it simply demonstrates
that they want to control the narrative of the Gacy case
and make sure that there are no errors that become public.
If there was one misidentification,
there could be multiple misidentifications,
and it could open up an entire forensic can of worms
for the entire Gacy case.
So the situation is where it is.
She believes the DNA tests show that that is not her son.
I believe he’s out there somewhere. I don’t know where.
And the sheriff department’s, I think,
feeling is that the DNA tests are faulty,
and that is Michael Marino.
My interest in the case is not the identified victims.
It’s the unidentified victims,
and Michael Marino was one of the identified victims.
I think there are a lot of people out there
that felt like there was more to this story,
that there were these unanswered questions,
and I’m sure there are a lot of people out there
that wanted to put this story to rest
and didn’t want to hear any more about John Wayne Gacy.
But I think for authorities,
a lot of careers were made on that case,
and so maybe that’s part of the reason
why they don’t want specific answers to these questions.
To me, the biggest questions are,
are there any bodies buried beneath Miami and Elston,
and if so, who are these people? So in 1998,
the Chicago Police Department digs at Miami and Elston.
Weeks of anticipation in Chicago
came to a head on a day where technicians paced off
the yard and driveway of the home
where John Gacy’s mother once lived.
The radar company finds 17 locations to dig,
but the Chicago Police Department only dug two holes.
The digging proceeded in the two
indicated sites throughout the day,
but by nightfall, the operation was halted.
We found a glass marble, a flattened saucepan,
a 2 1/2 length of wire.
The guy from the radar company said
that was not a good investigation.
It doesn’t make any sense to give 17 targets
and only dig two, and Terry Sullivan,
again, the former prosecutor in this case,
said he doesn’t understand why there was so much secrecy.
I was at that so-called dig on the northwest side,
and from everything that I could see,
the police department
really didn’t want anything more to do with it,
and why it was done in such secrecy, even to me,
that was something that I wondered about back then.
Today was the first scheduled that I’ve had
with Sheriff Dart’s people
regarding the Gacy investigation.
This site in ’98
was being investigated by Chicago Police Department,
but they didn’t do it right.
Now suddenly, Sheriff Dart is involved in this,
and he was certainly not involved at the time,
so he bore no responsibility
for how this investigation was handled.
But now he is in charge,
so I put it all on the table, basically.
I told him what I had, and I told him,
"I think you’d be making a very big mistake
if you think I’m walking away from this."
My intention was always to get the truth to the Miami location.
I’m still very skeptical if it’s going to be done correctly,
so I has to trust someone, so I’m going to give them
a little bit of time to see where it goes.
Toward the end of Gacy’s killing spree,
he had literally run out of space.
Could he then have used that place?
Most everything else we’d had was at his house,
garage or the Des Plaines River.
But based on his connection to the property,
it was definitely worth running out.
What we thought we could find
there would maybe be remains of another victim.
Cook County state’s attorney has agreed
to let the sheriff’s office search an apartment building
where serial killer John Gacy worked as a janitor,
but any additional digging at that site is still weeks
or even months away.
Dart announces in January of 2013
that he got a search warrant
for the property of Miami and Elston.
Nothing is happening, so Bill and I are chugging along,
following our various leads,
interviewing various players in the story.
At the end of March of 2013, we cooked up an idea
to have an open letter from Bill Dorsch posted on my blog,
saying, "There are indications that the local authorities
may be less sincere
than you might think about their determination to find out
if there were human remains at Miami and Elston.
I’m appealing to my fellow officers to keep an eye out
and let me know if it looks like something’s happening there."
I posted that letter,
and the next morning, Michael Sneed,
a very well-known columnist for the "Chicago Sun-Times,"
had an item in her column saying that Tom Dart
decided to do an investigation at Miami and Elston,
and it turned out that the investigation had happened
6 or 7 days earlier.
Wait a minute. What? Why now? Why all of a sudden?
They’re in. They’re out. "We didn’t find anything."
I remember waking up and finding out about it and being pissed
because I didn’t know about it.
There were no journalists out there.
When this whole story has been under a cloud of suspicion,
a cloud of suspicion that somewhat involves authorities,
you would’ve thought that maybe they would’ve wanted
some independent viewers there
to give it more credibility than what it has today,
and yet, they just went out one night,
and nobody knew about it.
I think our biggest concern was that we wanted
to run this out
but do it in the least invasive way as possible.
We tried to be very sensitive,
and I think we were, to the property owners.
We were trying to be very sensitive
to the notoriety behind this
because we knew if we did this thing with publicity,
it was going to have helicopters above us, crowds around us.
So we did this as somewhat of a, I don’t know,
well-coordinated strike, for lack of a better word.
We used a fantastic group of cadaver dogs from England,
ground-penetrating radar,
thermal imaging, all of the modern ...
We call these remote-sensing equipment.
We did ground-penetrating radar through the whole area,
and so anywhere we found something, we went for it,
and only once, we found some anomalies
that were where landscaping work would’ve been done
or something like that that would’ve fit the pattern,
but nothing panned out. We didn’t come up with anything.
After the end of the search,
there was absolutely no evidence or information
that there was anybody buried there.
They claimed that they had some new radar equipment,
et cetera, et cetera,
but I went out and talked to people,
and they said, "Look, the only way
to know for sure is to dig up the whole yard,
to dig up all the spots that you find."
That’s the only way you’re ever going to have the answers.
I think there was a concern for the property owner
and so forth, but come on.
You’re talking about tearing up a small yard and a driveway.
How much can it cost to repave a driveway and resod a small yard?
It’s a small price to pay to maybe get some answers
one way or another for a lot of families out there
who are living with a lot of questions.
I believe that they have gone as far as they can.
You just can’t go and dig up somebody’s property
just because there’s a rumor
that there may be something there,
but I don’t think there’s anything out there right now
that I know of that would lead to any further investigations,
despite the fact that I firmly believe there are other victims.
Do you actually feel that my investigation,
that my case has been thoroughly investigated?
I think during a case like this,
and I find this in many major cases,
that things are, at the time of the case,
are done rather hastily
because of the fact that there’s pressure on everybody.
Yeah, but that’s a political answer.
Yeah.
I don’t want a political answer from you.
Yeah. I want a basic answer.
Do you actually think that the investigation
of my case has been done right?
I believe in your case that there needs to be ...
that there should’ve been more focus on others,
that there should’ve been others checked out
a little more thoroughly.
That’s the belief I’ve developed over these years.
How many coincidences can you tolerate?
You have Gacy and his political connections,
a connection between Gacy and a sex-trafficking ring
that’s making pornography, the suggestion of accomplices,
more potential victims,
the property at Miami and Elston.
You just have to feel like there’s a thread
that connects them all,
that there’s something being hidden.
It would be such an injustice if there are people
that are still walking the Earth today
that were part of any of it
or any others that people don’t even know about.
It would be very sad, very sad thing.
Michael Rossi has stayed silent for four decades.
Rossi has never been charged with anything in the Gacy case,
so I’m not accusing him of anything,
but I think he may have some answers.
I’m hoping that one day, he will wake up and for whatever reason,
have a change of heart and tell what he knows,
even if it’s nothing. It would be good to hear
from someone who was in that circle at that time.
Today, we are announcing that we have identified
one more of the original eight that were unidentified,
Jimmy Haakenson.
Jimmy was 16 years old at the time
when he was murdered by John Gacy.
More leads continue to come in.
There’s family members from all over the country
that are still looking for their missing loved ones,
and then there’s new technologies that come to play,
like forensic genealogy.
Hopefully, we’ll solve other people’s cases like
we already have done.
I don’t think she knows what happened to him.
She still just loves him, and she’s looking for him,
and she wants to find him.
Is it at all possible that there might be
other victims above
and beyond the 33 in these other states?
No. You keep wanting to go back to that shit,
and I welcome you
to go check out every state that I’ve ever been in.
Okay. I find it inescapable
that Gacy did not do this in other states.
The guy traveled all the time all over the place.
You’re trying to tell me for 2 seconds
that that person would not be more emboldened
when he went to a different jurisdiction?
People don’t often think about it this way,
but being in any way an aspect of violent crime
or a whole boxful of violent crimes,
in John’s case,
is a lot like dropping a rock in the middle of a pond
because the ripples are going to go out
until they can’t go any further, and everything is affected.
Don Voorhees, he called me one day out of the blue,
and he said, "My life has been ruined.
I’ve lost my job." He says,
"I lost my wife and family. I can’t eat or sleep."
I didn’t know why he was calling me.
We weren’t close.
I think I urged him to get some professional help,
but the next thing I heard was that he had committed suicide.
I was impressed with how profound
and how deep the injury is that is caused to these victims.
You can’t bury history. It is something that happened,
and it will be talked about for a long time,
and you just deal with it,
and you have to learn from what happened and make things better.
And I think good things can come out of bad things.
The one thing that has always,
always been foremost in my mind
is how many lives this one single guy,
John Wayne Gacy, affected.
And that’s always stayed with me.
And I guess it always will.
It never ends. The case just never ends.
People come up to me to this day and will say,
"You represented John Gacy. How could you do that?"
And then on the other hand, they turn and they say,
"But tell me all about it,"
because as much as they are disgusted by him,
they want to know what he was like,
and there will always
be a fascination with John Gacy, always.
Yeah. I just think that we’re kind of wrapping it up here.
I think we accomplished something today.
Certainly, we put something down on tape that has not been said.
My feeling as a career law-enforcement officer is that
if John Wayne Gacy is guilty, then he should be punished.
If John Wayne Gacy has others involved,
then they should be brought in, and they should be punished.
Basically, I believe in total investigation and total justice,
and that’s really what I’ve been looking for all along.