John Wayne Gacy Murder Victim Was Named 45 Years After Disappearing

The body of one of John Wayne Gacy's murder victims was found just a few months ago, 45 years after he first went missing.

Francis Wayne Alexander was believed to have been around 21 or 22 when he first went missing in North Carolina the 1970s.

His is the third victim of Gacy's killings to be identified in the last decade.

Under the guise of a local contractor and 'clown-for-hire' - a profession that landed him the nickname of 'The Killer Clown' - John Wayne Gacy raped and murdered 33 men between 1972 and 1978.

To this day, investigators believe that the number of Gacy's victims could be even higher than this.

The body of Francis Wayne Alexander was among those found under Gacy's Chicago home in 1978.

It wasn't until 2011, when the investigation was reopened, that eight of the unidentified bodies were exhumed for DNA testing.

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DNA samples from Francis Wayne Alexander's body were matched to samples from his mother and his half-brother, finally allowing his family to grieve after decades of uncertainty over his disappearance.

Investigators understand that Francis would have been living in the north of Chicago for around a year before he was murdered by Gacy in 1976.

Soon after Francis was identified as a victim of Gacy's his surviving family said in a statement: "It is hard, even 45 years later, to know the fate of our beloved Wayne. He was killed at the hands of a vile and evil man.

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"Our hearts are heavy and our sympathies go out to the other victims’ families. Our only comfort is knowing this killer no longer breathes the same air as we do."

John Wayne Gacy was arrested on December 21, 1978, in 1980 he was convicted of murdering at least 33 people and sentenced to death; he was executed by lethal injection and died in 1994.

To learn more about the harrowing case of John Wayne Gacy, you can head to Netflix to stream Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes.