Gacy ‘Victim #24’ identified as Minnesota teen
Eight of 33 victims not known when first found
CHICAGO — After running away from his Minnesota home in 1976, 16-year-old Jimmy Haakenson called his mother, told her he was in Chicago, then disappeared forever.
More than 40 years later, a detective from Illinois arrived at the family’s home to tell Haakenson’s relatives that at some point after hanging up the phone, the teenager crossed paths with serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Haakenson’s body, it turns out, was among dozens found in a crawl space of Gacy’s Chicago-area home in 1978. But the remains were only recently identified thanks to DNA technology that wasn’t available then, the Cook County Sheriff ’s Department announced Wednesday.
Gacy was convicted of killing 33 young men and was executed in 1994. But the revelation about Haakenson is the latest turn in a yearslong effort to solve the remaining mystery surrounding Gacy’s case: Who were the eight victims authorities hadn’t been able to identify?
James “Jimmy” Byron Haakenson’s body is only the second person that authorities have identified since Sheriff Tom Dart in 2011 ordered the remains of the eight victims exhumed and asked families of young men who went missing in the 1970s to provide DNA samples.
Gacy lured young men to his home by impersonating a police officer or promising them construction work. There, he stabbed one and strangled the others. Most of the victims were buried under his home.
Illinois investigators long referred to Haakenson as simply “Victim #24.”
Haakenson’s mother was suspicious enough that her son was among the victims that she came to Chicago to talk to investigators. But she left without any answers because there was no way to identify the skeletal remains without dental records, Dart said.
Dart said a nephew of Haakenson became curious about the uncle he never knew and earlier this year went online to see if he could learn anything. That’s when he discovered Dart’s efforts to identify the remains of the eight young men.
Dart said the nephew went to his father, Haakenson’s brother, and his aunt, Lori Sisterman, and persuaded them to submit the samples for testing. “We got an immediate hit,” Dart said.
Authorities believe the teen was killed in August 1976, in part because of where he was found in Gacy’s house. Because Gacy was killing so many young men, his crawl space was filling up, forcing him to stack the bodies. Haakenson’s body was directly underneath Rick Johnston, who was last seen at a concert in Chicago on Aug. 6, 1976, and was on top of a still unidentified young man known as “Victim #26.”