After 41 years, a teenage victim of US serial killer John Wayne Gacy is finally identified

Notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy has been dead for more than two decades, but some of his victims are still regaining their names, one by one.

James “Jimmie” Byron Haakenson was confirmed as one of the seven remaining unidentified victims the killer buried in the crawl space of his home, thanks to advancements in DNA analysis, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said in a statement Wednesday.

Before July 6, Haakenson, who ran away at age 16 from his Minnesota home and vanished in Chicago in 1976, was known only by a grim moniker: Gacy Victim #24.

He joins another victim whose name has only recently come to light - 19-year-old William George Bundy, whose remains were identified in 2011 following renewed efforts by Dart to close the chapter in one of the darkest strings of murders in American history that left at least 33 boys and young men dead.

At the time of Gacy’s execution in 1994 by lethal injection, only 25 victims had been identified, according to the New York Times. The others were given gravestones that said, “We Are Remembered.” Gacy is only outpaced by Garry Ridgway and Ted Bundy in the number of known serial murders in recent United States history. Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, was convicted of 48 murders. Ted Bundy is believed to have killed more than 30 young women and girls.

Dental record analysis was the standard victim identification method in the 1970s, but Haakenson’s records were not available for unclear reasons, the statement said. It would be decades before technology advanced enough to analyze samples scraped from remains and cross-referenced with relatives.

In 2011, Dart reopened the investigation and sent out a request for saliva samples of close relatives of young men who disappeared between 1970 and Gacy’s arrest in 1978.