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DNA Identifies William George Bundy, 19, as One of John Wayne Gacy's Unnamed Victims After 35 Years

Bundy vanished in October 1976 after saying he was going to a party. He was the first named under the Cook County sheriff's 2011 push to identify eight unknown victims.

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Illustration of gloved hands loading sample tubes into a machine on a laboratory bench. Not an actual scene from the case.

For 35 years, William George Bundy's family did not know what became of him. On November 29, 2011, DNA identified him as one of John Wayne Gacy's unnamed victims.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said DNA and other identifiers had matched remains found in the crawl space of Gacy's house to Bundy, who was 19 when he disappeared in October 1976. On the night he vanished, he reportedly said he was going to a party, and he was never seen or heard from again. His younger sister, Laura O'Leary, who attended the news conference, said she had always thought he might be a Gacy victim because he had been working construction jobs just before he disappeared; Gacy was known to lure young men looking for work through his remodeling and construction company. "I always knew he was going to be one of them," she said. "But there was no DNA back then, so there was nothing I could really do."

Gacy was convicted of murdering 33 young men and boys in the 1970s and was executed in 1994, but eight of his victims had never been identified. Seven were found in the crawl space beneath his house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, and an eighth was buried in his yard. Earlier in 2011, Dart had launched a renewed effort to identify them using advances in DNA technology, and Bundy was the first of the eight to be named. Jimmie Haakenson was identified in 2017 and Francis Wayne Alexander in 2021.

The Cook County Sheriff's Office has said Gacy killed his victims in Chicago, while the Chicago Tribune and the sheriff's own 2021 release placed his house, where most were found, in unincorporated Norwood Park Township.

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