CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago-area sheriff has identified another victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy as a 16-year-old boy from Minnesota.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart issued a news release on Wednesday identifying the victim as James Byron Haakenson. Haakenson ran away from Minnesota and is believed to have been killed in August 1976.
The teen’s remains were among those of more than two dozen young men Gacy stabbed or strangled who were found in the crawl space of his Chicago-area home in 1978. Haakenson is one of eight who were buried without being identified.
Remains of the eight victims were exhumed in 2011 in an effort to identify them through DNA testing. Dart’s office asked that relatives of young men who disappeared between 1970 and Gacy’s 1978 arrest submit to DNA testing in hopes of finding matches.
Haakenson is the second of the eight to be identified. The other victim, 19-year-old William George Bundy, was identified months after the exhumations.
Gacy was executed in 1994.