Photo: Bruna Prado / Getty Images
The horrifying story of the killer clown Pennywise in real life, John Wayne Gacy , has taken another turn when one of his 45 victims was identified 45 years after his disappearance.
The remains of Francis Wayne Alexander were among those first found in the space between Gacy’s house and the one next to it in the Chicago area at 1978.
It appears that his crimes partially inspired Stephen King’s horror novel “It.” 1986, which features an infamous clown, Pennywise, who preys on children.
In 2011, the police ordered that the bodies of eight unidentified victims from the scene be exhumed in an effort to identify them through DNA testing.
To the families of the young people who had disappeared between 1970 and Gacy’s arrest in 1978 were later asked to send saliva samples for compare the DNA with the eight victims who were buried without being identified.
The researchers were now able to match samples from the mother and half brother of Alexander with his remains.
Alexander’s sister, Carolyn Sanders, thanked the sheriff’s office for giving the family “closure.”
“It’s difficult, even 45 years later, knowing the fate of our beloved Wayne. He was killed at the hands of a vile and evil man, “said Sanders.
” Now we can put aside what happened and move on honoring Wayne ”.
Authorities say they are unsure how Alexander’s paths crossed with Gacy, one of America’s most infamous serial killers.
He had moved to Chicago where he was married for about three months before divorcing in 1975.
In January 1976, received a traffic ticket in the city. After this, officers found no record that he was alive.
Alexander “lived in an area that was frequented by Gacy and where other identified victims had previously lived,” the sheriff’s office said.
Alexander is the third Gacy victim to be identified in the last decade.
Would have 21 or 22 years when Gacy killed him between 1976 and 1977, the police said.
Months later, William George Bundy, a worker of the construction of 19 years, he was identified as another victim of Gacy.
In 2017, James Byron Haakenson, a missing teenager from Minnesota ta, was identified as another of his victims.
The real-life killer clown, whose story is more chilling than any horror movie, would attract his young victims to his home in Norwood Park, Illinois.
Once they were there, the killer tricked them into handcuffs, rendering them defenseless against torture and sexual assault by the predator.
All of his victims were strangled or suffocated, except the first, whom he stabbed, before their bodies were hidden in the access space of his house, buried in his property or dumped into the local Des Plaines River.
But all the time, Gacy was living a double life, presenting himself as a member prominent in the local community and doing charity work under the character of “Pogo the Clown.”
Born on 17 March 1200 in Chicago, Illinois, Gacy was severely abused children at the hands of his alcoholic father.
The killer became successful as a businessman, running three KFC restaurants before starting his own construction company.
Gacy’s first marriage, to Marlynn Myers, saw him father a son and daughter, but she divorced him after he was convicted of sexually abusing a young woman of 16 years in 1968.
He was paroled in 1970 and married divorcee Carole Hoff in 1972.
In his spare time, Gacy would don his clown costume and pretend to be Pogo, a cheerful clown who helped the ace It was to “go back to childhood.”
But no one had any idea that the sick man under the mask of a clown was a sadistic murderer responsible for a series of disappearances in the area.
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