Gacy investigation leads to breakthrough in separate, 36-year-old cold case

Because of John Wayne Gacy, John Doe No. 89 now has a name.

It’s Andy Drath, who as a teenage boy fit the profile of many of the serial killer’s victims. Authorities don’t think Drath was one of them, though investigators looking into Gacy’s past did manage to put two and two together in a major breakthrough in a 36-year-old cold case and major relief to Drath’s family.

Cold case cops find new DNA strategy

“You should never lose hope in finding your loved one.” said Dr. Willia Wertheimer, Drath’s half-sister who submitted DNA that proved pivotal. “… John Doe No. 89 now will come home to his kid sister with his own name – Andy.”

A ward of Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services, Drath was a 16-year-old boy when he was last seen in late 1978 or early the next year, the Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff’s Office announced Wednesday. He’d gone west to San Francisco, hoping to have his guardianship transferred there.

Authorities launch new effort to identify Gacy victims

It was in that Northern California city, in June 1979, that police found a male’s body with multiple gunshot wounds in a homicide.

They didn’t know who he was, much less who killed him. And, according to authorities, his case went cold.

At least until Gacy entered the picture.

Gacy investigators sought help

Gacy was arrested in December 1978, and about 14 months later, he went on trial. It ended with his conviction for raping and killing 33 boys and young men who he had lured into his home over a span of six years. To get them there, he’d promised them construction jobs, drugs and alcohol or by posing as a police officer or by offering money for sex.

John Wayne Gacy killed 33 men and boys between 1972 and 1978. Many of his victims, mostly drifters and runaways, were buried in a crawlspace beneath his suburban Chicago home. Here's a look at some other notorious convicted serial killers.

Jeffery Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms for the murders of 17 men and boys in the Milwaukee area between 1978 and 1991. Dahmer had sex with the corpses of his victims and kept the body parts of others, some of which he ate. Dahmer and another prison inmate were beaten to death during a work detail in November 1994.

Law enforcement officers meet in San Francisco in 1969 to compare notes on the Zodiac Killer, who is believed to have killed five people in 1968 and 1969. The killer gained notoriety by writing several letters to police boasting of the slayings. He claimed to have killed as many as 37 people and has never been caught.

Authorities said DNA recovered from the body of Mary Sullivan matches that of her suspected killer, the confessed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo. After a sample was secretly collected from a relative, DeSalvo's body was exhumed in July 2013 for more DNA testing. From mid-1962 to early 1964, the Boston Strangler killed at least 13 women. DeSalvo was stabbed to death in 1973 while serving a prison sentence for rape.

Ed Gein killed at least two women and dug up the corpses of several others from a cemetery in Wisconsin, using their skin and body parts to make clothing and household objects in the 1950s.

In 1973, Juan Corona, a California farm laborer, was sentenced to 25 consecutive life sentences for the murders of 25 people found hacked to death in shallow graves.

Joseph Paul Franklin was convicted in 1997 of murdering Gerald Gordon outside a St. Louis synagogue in 1977. Franklin was also convicted of at least five other murders, receiving a string of life sentences, but he suggested that he was responsible for 22 murders. He was best known for shooting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, who was paralyzed from the attack. Franklin was executed in November 2013.

In 1977, David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam, confessed to the murders of six people in New York City. Berkowitz, now serving six consecutive 25-to-life sentences, claimed that a demon spoke to him through a neighbor's dog.

Cousins Kenneth Bianchi, seen here, and Angelo Buono were charged with the murders of nine women between 1977 and 1978. Also known as the Hillside Stranglers, the cousins sexually assaulted and sometimes tortured their victims, leaving their bodies on roadsides in the hills of Southern California.

Wayne Williams killed at least two men between 1979 and 1981, and police believed he might have been responsible for more than 20 other deaths in the Atlanta area. Williams was convicted and sentenced to two life terms in 1982.

After serving 15 years for murdering his mother, Henry Lee Lucas was convicted in 1985 in nine more murders. Lucas was the only inmate spared from execution by Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Richard Ramirez, also known as the Night Stalker, was convicted of 13 murders and sentenced to death in California in 1989. The self-proclaimed devil worshiper found his victims in quiet neighborhoods and entered their homes through unlocked windows and doors.

During a routine traffic stop, a police officer found a dead U.S. Marine in the front seat of a car driven by Randy Steven Kraft. Kraft was linked to 45 murders and sentenced to death in 1989. He would pick up hitchhikers, give them drugs and alcohol, sexually assault them and then mutilate and strangle them.

Ted Bundy raped and killed at least 16 young women in the early to mid-1970s before he was executed in 1989. A crowd of several hundred gathered outside the prison where he was executed, and they cheered at the news of his death.

Joel David Rifkin was stopped by police for driving without a license plate when a body was found in his pickup. Rifkin killed 17 women in New York between 1991 and 1993 and was sentenced to life in prison.

Charles Ng, seen here, and accomplice Leonard Lake tortured, killed and buried 11 people in northern California between 1984 and 1985. After the men were arrested for shoplifting, police found bullets and a silencer in their car and took them into the police station for questioning. Lake killed himself there with a cyanide pill. Ng was later sentenced to death.

Robert Lee Yates Jr. killed 15 people, most of them between 1996 and 1998. He buried one of them in a flower bed by his house in the Spokane, Washington, area. Most of his victims were prostitutes or drug addicts he killed in his van. He is on Washington's death row.

Gary Leon Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, confessed to 48 killings after his DNA was linked to a few of his victims. Remains of his victims, mostly runaways and prostitutes, turned up in ravines, rivers, airports and freeways in the Pacific Northwest.

Aileen Wuornos was executed in Florida in 2002 for the murders of seven men whom she had lured by posing as a prostitute or a distressed traveler.

Derrick Todd Lee was accused of raping and killing six women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, between 2001 and 2003. He was arrested in Atlanta for the murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, convicted in 2004 and sentenced to death.

Danny Rolling pleaded guilty to the 1990 murders of five students he raped, tortured and mutilated in Gainesville, Florida. Rolling was also found responsible for a 1991 triple homicide in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was executed in 2006.

Angel Maturino Resendez, also known as the Railway Killer, was a drifter from Mexico. During the 1990s, he would rob and kill his victims near railroad tracks on both sides of the border and then hop rail cars to escape. Resendez was executed in 2006.

Pig farmer Robert Pickton was charged with 26 counts of murder after police found the bodies of young women on his farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. He was convicted of six murders in 2007, and he is serving a life sentence.

The BTK Strangler, Dennis Rader, killed 10 people between 1977 and 1991 in the Wichita, Kansas, area. He was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms in 2005. Rader named himself BTK, short for "bind, torture, kill."

Police found the decomposing and buried bodies of 10 women and the skull of another woman at the Cleveland home of ex-Marine Anthony Sowell. He was convicted and given the death penalty in 2011.

Chester Dewayne Turner was sentenced to death for murdering 14 women and one victim's unborn fetus in the Los Angeles area between 1987 and 1998. Turner was later convicted and sentenced to death for four more murders.

Infamous serial killers

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Twenty-eight bodies were found in and around the serial killer’s Chicago home, most of them in a 40-foot crawl space beneath his house and garage. Four others had been thrown into the Des Plaines River.

Yet while authorities believed and the jury agreed that Gacy was responsible for all these deaths, that didn’t mean they knew who all of them were.

That was the case in 2011, seven years after the serial killer was executed, when the Cook County Sheriff’s Office launched a new effort to identify eight of the victims.

This time, they’d use new technology to obtain DNA profiles, an effort they hoped would provide closure to families looking for their loved ones for decades.

Sheriff: Case shows ‘never give up’

Only of those eight Gacy victims, William George Bundy, has been positively identified as a result.

The Cook County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Wednesday that 12 cases have been closed as a result of Gacy-related leads, in part because relatives of missing people from that era and area came forward with new information at the urging of authorities.

William George Bundy was nearly 19 when he was reported missing in October 1976. Decades later, authorities determined that John Wayne Gacy had killed him.

In five cases, once-missing people were found alive and were reunited with their families. Two others died of natural causes after they were reported missing. And there was some resolution for four other instances – Drath being one of them.

Wertheimer, his maternal half-sister, reached out to the Sheriff’s Office and submitted DNA thinking that Drath – as a young white male from Chicago’s North Side – fit the profile of Gacy’s other victims.

Investigators weren’t able to link her to any of Gacy’s known victims, but her information was uploaded to a federal DNA database. DNA from Darth’s tissue samples was uploaded in late 2014, though it wasn’t until May 2015 that this was matched with Wertheimer. Dental records and a tattoo with the name “Andy” confirmed the connection.

Wertheimer learned of the link on September 10, and San Francisco police are now trying to find the killer – not of John Doe No. 89 but of Andre “Andy” Drath.

“I’m thankful that Andy Drath will be brought home and laid to rest with the dignity he deserves,” Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart said. “This breakthrough illustrates that we should never give up on a cold case, no matter how hopeless it appears.”