Gacy Victim 24 Identified

Siblings Gave DNA That Revealed Crawl-Space Remains Were Those of Minnesota Teen
by Megan Crepeau

Jimmie Haakenson set out on an adventure more than 40 years ago, traveling to Chicago from his Minnesota home at just 16. But the boy with a sunny smile disappeared without a trace, and on Wednesday, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said Haakenson fell victim to Chicago’s most notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy. DNA supplied by a brother and sister helped confirm that Haakenson was Victim 24, whose remains were found buried with many of the other victims in the crawl Gacy space of Gacy’s Chicago-area house.

“My brother has been missing for so long, and it’s so nice to know that we’ve found our brother now, even though now it’s not good,” Lorie Sisterman, Haakenson’s sister, told the Tribune in a phone interview Wednesday evening from her home in Minnesota. “It’s so wonderful, but it’s also, you know, horrible at the same time.” Gacy was convicted of killing 33 boys and young men in the 1970s, 32 of them strangled.

All but four of the victims were found in the crawl space of Gacy’s home in Norwood Park Township. He was executed by lethal injection in state prison in 1994 after his appeals failed. Six years ago, Dart announced his office had reopened the Gacy investigation in hopes of identifying eight victims whose Turn to Victim, Page 11.