Area Visitor Was 1st Gacy Victim
By Mike Gallagher
A young man who disappeared in Chicago on a return trip from visiting relatives in Eaton Rapids 14 years ago has been identified as the first murder, victim of convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy. After a three-month investigation, officials of the Cook County Sheriffs forensic division Friday identified the youth as then-15-year-old Timothy Jack McCoy of Glenwood, Iowa. Chicago police Monday was unaware of McCoy’s mid-Michigan ties. The Lansing State Journal learned of McCoy’s family connections from one of the cousins he visited for Christmas and New Year’s Eve 1971. That cousin, Beverly Billings, now of Lansing, is responsible for providing authorities with clues that led to McCoy’s identification.
McCoy’s remains have been buried in an unmarked Chicago grave. His remains were among those of nine unidentified boys unearthed in 1978 from beneath Gacy’s Chicago-area home. Billings never stopped wondering what became of her cousin after he disappeared New Year’s Day 1972 from a Chicago bus station while awaiting a connecting Greyhound bus ride to his home in Iowa. Insisting he had to leave his relative’s Eaton Rapids home that New Year’s Day, McCoy was anxious to return to Glenwood, where he lived with his aunt, Hazel McCollum, and had a new job awaiting him the next day.
The blond-haired youth never got on the Greyhound bus that was to take him to Iowa, though. His 13-hour layover in Chicago proved fatal. The story of how McCoy came to be identified is almost as bizarre as his murder, Chicago police officials say. Billings suspected that one of Gacy’s nine unidentified victims might be her cousin after reading a detailed account of Gacy’s killing spree in a copy of US magazine while seated in an East Lansing doctor’s office last February. Gacy sold his mass-murder story to writer Tim Cahill.
The book, released this spring, is “Buried Dreams: The Chilling Story of Serial Killer John Wayne Gacy.” In the book, Gacy details the appearance, conversation and murder of his first victim.
