TWO MISSING MEN who were presumed to have been among the more than 30 victims of US serial killer John Wayne Gacy in the late 1970s have turned up alive.
Gacy was convicted of murdering 33 young men and sentenced to death for 12 of the murders. He was executed in May 1994.
He had lured some of his victims to his home for sex or with the promise of hiring them for construction work. According to US prosecutors, Gacy had concealed the bodies of 27 of his victims beneath his home in the Chicago suburbs.
US authorities have been trying to identify eight of Gacy’s victims for decades and recently exhumed the remains in the hope that DNA testing could help the identification process. The Cook County Sheriff’s office says that one of the eight has since been identified.
Alive
Two men whose families long suspected had been among Gacy’s victims were recently located safe and well.
Ted Szal, then aged 25, ran from his Chicago home in 1977 after a difficult divorce and family feud. Speaking to the Associated Press yesterday, Szal explained that when he abandoned his car at O’Hare Airport, he threw his life away.
Authorities believed he fit the profile of Gacy’s victims partly because the killer had lived near O’Hare and Szal had worked in construction and disappeared at the airport.
Szal, now 59, said it never occurred to him that his family might think he was dead or had been murdered by Gacy. Police traced him after his family approached them in response to the plea for information about the unidentified victims.
Szal said yesterday that although he felt a “horrible weight” had been lifted in knowing he can reconnect with his family, he hasn’t spoken with his relatives yet.
A second young man reported missing in 1977 and thought to have been killed by Gacy also turned up alive in recent weeks.
After hearing that the police had reopened their cold case to identify the unknown victims, the family of Harold Wayne Lovell who disappeared from Chicago in 1977 aged 19 approached the authorities.
For decades they believed Lovell was one of Gacy’s victims and that the two men’s paths had crossed while Lovell was working in construction 34 years ago.
However, the Chicago Tribune reports that the police were able to tell Lovell’s relatives that he was alive and well, and living in Florida.
The family was reunited in late October. Lovell said that he had left home over difficulties in his relationship with his mother.
- Additional reporting by the AP
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