James Byron Haakenson was 16 when he ran away from his St. Paul, Minnesota home and traveled to Chicago. He called his mother on August 5, 1976 to say he had arrived in the city; that was the last time his family heard from him.

Remains later recovered in December 1978 from the crawl space of John Wayne Gacy’s Norwood Park, Illinois home were catalogued as Body 24. Decades passed before those remains were identified by DNA testing in 2017 as Haakenson, after his siblings provided samples following their nephew’s questions about his uncle.

Haakenson is among the 33 young men and boys murdered by Gacy. The identification brought some closure to family members who had wondered about his fate for years. Paul or information about his last days in Chicago?