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DNA Names Gacy Victim No. 24 as Jimmie Haakenson, 16, Who Called His Mother From Chicago in 1976

The St. Paul teenager's mother had tried to learn his fate in 1979. His siblings' DNA answered the question, leaving six of John Wayne Gacy's victims unnamed.

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Illustration of gloved hands pipetting samples into a tray at a forensic laboratory bench. Not the actual laboratory.

Jimmie Haakenson called his mother on August 5, 1976, and told her he was in Chicago. He was 16. He had left home in St. Paul, Minnesota, that summer, and after that call no one in his family saw or heard from him again.

More than two years later, on December 29, 1978, investigators digging beneath John Wayne Gacy's house lifted a body from a grave in the crawl space that held more than one victim. No one could put a name to it. For almost four decades it was Victim No. 24.

On July 19, 2017, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart announced that Victim No. 24 was Jimmie. At the request of the Sheriff's Police, two of his siblings gave DNA samples to their local police departments, and the samples went to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification to be tested against the remains of the unnamed victims. The genetic association with No. 24 was strong. Detectives then went back through his original missing person report, his Social Security records and the post-mortem reports to make sure Victim No. 24 and Jimmie were the same person. The family was formally told on Monday, July 17.

His mother had tried to find out. In 1979 she asked whether her son might be one of Gacy's victims, but no dental records for him were available, and dental comparison was then the main scientific way to identify the dead. She did not live to hear the answer.

The grave Jimmie lay in held two other young men. One was Rick Johnston, identified during the original investigation, whose last known contact was August 6, 1976, one day after Jimmie's call home. The other, Victim No. 26, still has no name. Judging by those dates and by where the three lay in the crawl space, investigators believe Gacy killed them at or near the same time.

Gacy was convicted of murdering 33 teenage boys and young men in Chicago between 1972 and 1978, and he was executed in 1994. Eight of his victims were still unidentified when Dart reopened the effort to name them in 2011. Jimmie was the second to be named since then, after William Bundy, which left six. The work had also turned up answers to other questions along the way: four unrelated cold cases solved, five missing people found alive, and two others found to have died without their families knowing. The sheriff's office asked anyone who believed a missing male relative might have been one of Gacy's victims to come forward.

What this story covers. It rests on the Cook County Sheriff's Office press release of July 19, 2017, and the account of how the identification was made is the sheriff's own. The release names the laboratory as the "University of Northern Texas"; the institution is the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification. The release says nothing more about Jimmie's life before he left St. Paul, and this story does not add to it. The picture is an illustration, not the actual laboratory.

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