XPost: alt.politics.miserable-failure, alt.journalism.gay-press, alt.politics.greens
XPost: alt.dislocated.ass
CHICAGO – It’s been 36 years since Willa Wertheimer last saw
the brother she knew as Andy.
Andre Drath was just 16 when he left home in Chicago for San
Francisco and was never heard from again, leaving his loved ones
in uncertain despair over his fate. But the mystery of what
became of her brother was finally solved as a byproduct of an
investigation into one of the most infamous serial killers the
nation has ever known, John Wayne Gacy.
Of the 33 males found buried in Gacy’s crawl space, eight were
never identified. When Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart reopened
the case in 2011 with the goal of learning their names, his
office sought DNA samples of family members of Chicago-area boys
who vanished in the late 1970s. Wertheimer sent hers, and while
Andy was not one of the eight, her sample matched one in the
federal database from a John Doe gunned down decades ago on the
streets of San Francisco.
“Although I’m terribly sad, the knowing is so much better,”
Wertheimer, who still lives in Chicago, told Fox News. “It
seemed like a long shot for a kid living on the fringe, after 35
years.
“Although I’m terribly sad, the knowing is so much better.”
- Willa Wertheimer
“Andy had become an invisible life, living on the streets,” she
said.
While Wertheimer’s hunch that her brother had been a victim of
Gacy, the monster who dressed as a clown to prey on young boys,
proved incorrect, it did lead to closure. When police found
Drath, DNA identification was unavailable but police had kept
tissue samples in the hope of a future identification.
Some 12 other cold cases were similarly solved, thanks to the
renewed focus on the unidentified Gacy victims. Dart’s
nationwide call for DNA samples came after investigators
determined Gacy had traveled far more than previously known,
meaning his victims could have come from as far away as
California or Canada.
“The very nature of this, it’s always going to be a bit of a
long shot given the people that he targeted and the breadth of
his killing,” Dart said. “When we began this endeavor we were
hopeful but not naïve.”
The DNA samples from dozens of people with missing relatives
also led to police to identify others in unsolved cases,
including Daniel Noe, a Peoria, Ill., man who disappeared in
1978 when he was just 21. In 2012, a DNA sample from Noe’s
relative was matched to one from a body found on Mount Olympus,
near Salt Lake City. Foul play was not suspected in that case.
Ron Soden, now 75, of Washington state, had sent his sample to
Dart’s office on the chance that his long lost kid brother had
been a Gacy victim. It turned out that the death of Steven
Soden, who was just 16 when he ran away from a New Jersey
orphanage in 1972, was unrelated to Gacy. But the sample turned
up a match to skeletal remains found in a New Jersey state park
in 2000.
In three other cases, DNA samples collected as part of the Gacy
probe led to living men, including one in Las Vegas, and
another who had been living in Oregon with his spouse and
children.
The effort has also led to the identity of one of the eight
previously unknown victims buried at Gacy’s home – its original
objective. In all, more than 50 people have so far submitted
their DNA to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office to be tested
against the DNA of the unidentified Gacy victims.
Wetheimer had a message for others with missing relatives.
“To those whose loved ones have gone missing even long ago, I
stand here as a testament that you should never lose hope for
closure that you’ve longed for,” she said.
Gacy was executed in 1994.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/09/23/decades-later-john-wayne- gacy-probe-still-solving-cold-cases/
Every homosexual should be executed.
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