Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart speaks at a news conference accompanied by Dr. Willa Wertheimer Wednesday, September 23, 2015, in Chicago.
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The unknown victim of a 1979 homicide in San Francisco has been identified as a 16-year-old runaway, according to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, who said the discovery came from their efforts to solve a handful of murders by executed serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
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.
While Wertheimer’s hunch that her brother had been a victim of Gacy, the monster who dressed as a clown to prey on young boys, proved incorrect, it did lead to closure. However, the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office took great care to preserve tissues for future examination.
Five families who submitted DNA learned that their relatives were alive and have reconnected with them. However, Sheriff’s investigators uploaded her DNA sample to the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the federal DNA database, to be cross referenced with DNA of unidentified deceased persons throughout the nation.
Wertheimer was notified of the match this month. But the mystery of what became of her brother was finally solved as a byproduct of an investigation into one of the most infamous serial killers the nation has ever known, John Wayne Gacy.
Like the samples from the unidentified Gacy victims, those samples were uploaded into a federal database and Dart’s office was notified in May of a genetic association between Wertheimer and the San Francisco remains.
Department of Children and Family Services records show Drath traveled to San Francisco, hoping to get his guardianship transferred there, but was never heard from again. “… John Doe No. 89 now will come home to his kid sister with his own name – Andy”.
In June of 1979, police in San Francisco found the body of a young man but had no idea who he was or who killed him.
“This breakthrough illustrates that we should never give up on a cold case, no matter how hopeless it appears”, Dart said. Two others were found to have died of natural causes after going missing. But they have also closed 11 unrelated missing-person cases, including four murder cold cases, police said in a statement.
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In 2012, authorities identified the remains of Noe, whose family in Chicago were concerned that he might have been target after he vanished in 1978 on his way home after a stint working in Oregon and Washington state. As part of the investigation, they asked family members of young men who went missing in the 1970s to submit DNA to test for possible matches with the unidentified victims.
