Enlarge image
Photos of the victim presented at a press conference on Monday
Photo: AP
On December 26, 1978, the remains of Francis Wayne Alexander were discovered in a crawl space under the home of infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy in Chicago.
For decades it was unclear who the dead person might be.
Now, with the help of a group of scientists from the DNA Doe Project (DDP), the police have succeeded in clarifying the victim's identity.
The organization's website states that a laboratory in California successfully extracted DNA from a tooth of the dead, which was analyzed in Huntsville, Alabama.
Genetic genealogists in Texas, on the other hand, compared the data and used it to find a cousin of the dead man.
The police then asked Alexander's mother and half-brother for DNA samples.
Their DNA was very similar to that of the dead person, it was said.
Together with the results of the investigation, it was concluded that it must be Alexander.
The family was informed of the results on Friday, according to CNN.
A total of 27 bodies were found in the crawl space of the serial perpetrator, two more under the garage and in the backyard.
"He was unlucky to live in the area where John Wayne Gacy committed most of his murders and targeted most of his victims," said County Sheriff Tom Dart, according to CNN.
The victim was born in North Carolina and moved to Chicago after a long stay in New York.
Alexander was murdered between 1972 and 1978, according to the location of the body and other investigations, probably in the period between spring 1976 and March 1977, DDP reported.
At that point, Alexander - whom his family believed had withdrawn - was 21 or 22 years old.
In a statement, the bereaved wrote: “It is hard, even 45 years later, to learn the fate of our beloved Wayne.
He was killed by the hand of a hideous and evil man. "The only consolation is to know" that this killer no longer breathes the same air as we ".
John Wayne Gacy was executed with lethal injection on May 10, 1994 in the US state of Illinois.
He went down in history as the so-called killer clown and served Stephen King as a template for his novel "It".
ala